Orienting through the variety of novelty metrics

Assessing creativity of generated ideas is of crucial importance for both design research and early detection of potential innovations. By the identification of the most acknowledged novelty metrics used for creativity-related assessments in the field of engineering design, this paper aims at providing crucial information to orient through the variety of alternatives. A systematic literature review is performed by relying on the Scopus search engine, and a search strategy based on both practical and quality-related screening procedures. The identified contributions are then classified in terms of both creativity and novelty concepts. A set of 140 papers has been reviewed, where a subset of 37 mentioned or proposed novelty metrics has been considered. A map of the metrics has been obtained, in terms of creativity types, novelty concepts and metric types. Although it is possible to find comprehensive reviews about creativity concepts and related metrics, contributions focused on novelty metrics are currently lacking. This is the first contribution that focuses on a wide set of novelty concepts and related metrics, by mapping them to support metric selection.