Creativity Improvement by Idea-Marathon Training, Measured by Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) and Its Applications to Laboratories

In Japan, recently many laboratories are adopting Idea-Marathon System (IMS) for creative training of their researchers. It becomes more important how IMS can contribute to improve creativity through the typical IMS training in quantitative analysis. This paper explains analysis of empirical experiment for measuring effect of creativity improvement before and after IMS training method for about a 3 months period, especially for researchers in R&D and laboratories. To confirm the creativity influence to researchers in details, TTCT (Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking) Figural tests were selected. One major food manufacturer's laboratory in Tokyo, Japan offered us the cooperation for this experiment. There are two tests of TTCT Figural tests, i.e. Pre-test and Post-test. This paper describes the statistical analysis result of both Pre-test (Figural A test of TTCT) and the Post-test (Figural B test of TTCT) between which Idea-Marathon training was continued for about three months by all the participants. As the result of analysis between two TTCT tests scoring before and after IMS training for three months, IMS was found significantly effective to improve creative factors proposed in the TTCT test.