  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 communication (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.
