Measuring productivity in the creative economy

The old business paradigm of gauging productivity was to watch the clock and see how many widgets can be created in a work day. Work was no time to play. It was to execute. If you didn’t meet your quota you were reprimanded.

This style measured productivity with managerial clock-watching, unit counting and card punching. This paradigm is about creating quantity with tolerances for overall product performance.

The new paradigm within the Creativity Economy is more complex.

Productivity can no longer be measured by time or units. You cannot judge an idea by the time it took to create it or how many ideas you had in one day. Great ideas can come to an employee at anytime, anywhere at the snap-of-your-fingers or through an intensive creative process that took hours and hours of research. Valuable insights and solutions can come from exploration and play that cannot be easily measured.

So how do you measure productivity in the creative economy?

By the ideas impact on your customer’s world.