Creativity Index: While few people would argue against the desirability of placing creative people in new product development project analysis positions, the question of how a firm can accurately identify creative people has been less clear. One answer is to use personality testing to assess the creativity of a firm’s personnel. One such assessment tool found to be particularly useful is the MBTI Creativity Index, or MBTI-CI .

Rainmaker index: Applying Keirsey’s theory of Temperaments resulted in developing a new “Rainmaker Index” specifically tuned to profitability from the “fuzzy front end” of new product development. According to research conducted by Greg A. Stevens, James Burley, Ph.D. and Richard Devine presented to the 1998 Research Conference at the Annual International Conference of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), analysts with MBTI preferences for intuition (“N”) and thinking (“T”) score highest on this index. Analysts in this grouping represented the top third of the “Rainmaker Index” and generated 95 times more profit than those in the bottom third. This compares to 11 times more profit for the analysts in the top third of the MBTI-Creativity Index which included the MBTI preferences of intuition (“N”) and feeling (“F”) in addition to the previous named grouping.

Hence, the “Rainmaker Index” further improves the identification of analysts who will identify profitable opportunities in the “fuzzy front end” of NPD by a factor of 8.6 times compared to the previously reported MBTI-CI.