We introduce two operational entanglement measures which are applicable for arbitrary multipartite (pure or mixed) states. One of them characterizes the potentiality of a state to generate other states via local operations assisted by classical commu
nication (LOCC) and the other the simplicity of generating the state at hand. We show how these measures can be generalized to two classes of entanglement measures. Moreover, we compute the new measures for pure few-partite systems and use them to characterize the entanglement contained in a three-qubit state. We identify the GHZ- and the W-state as the most powerful pure three-qubit states regarding state manipulation.
