Hard Creativity
Colorado Taking a Big Step Toward the Future of Creative Work
Next Thursday, October 9 at the Ent Center for the Arts at UCCS in Colorado Springs, hundreds of front-range leaders from across business, science, arts, and civic life are registered to gather for something new: the launch of Creativity America, a national partnership movement for the future of creative work, led by the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs / C3 Innovation.
» Register Here to join us at this fully in-person event. Together, we’ll begin co-creating America’s living lab for Creative Brain Capital. In this article, I outline what’s at stake.
Invisible Drag on Innovation
We have perfected systems for managing financial capital. We measure it, reinvest it, and track it precisely.
What we lack are systems for capturing and reinvesting the wonder that sparks new ideas.
I discovered this insight a couple of years ago, when the leaders of a Midwestern state invited me to observe their annual travel and tourism industry conference and offer the perspective of a Culture Futurist.
After two days of celebrating $50+ billion in annual revenue and 250 million visitors, I debriefed with the small table of executives and arts leaders who had organized the event.
I asked a simple question:
You have excellent systems for capturing and reinvesting $50B+ in financial capital. But what are your systems for capturing and reinvesting the wonder sparked in the minds of those 250 million visitors?
The casual chatter stopped.
In that moment, I realized I had stumbled into something much larger than tourism.
What I saw on their faces was the invisible architecture of how most organizations define success: built almost entirely on lagging indicators. Data that shows what made you successful yesterday. But, how do you know if you’re prepared for what may happen tomorrow? That’s the challenge of leading innovation in times of extreme cultural and technological change.
We’ve been trained to value what we can easily count. And we often miss what truly counts. In today’s climate, where AI accelerates the pace of change, that oversight is no longer sustainable.
Hard Creativity: Our Big Beyond Within
Every organization in every industry is engaged in the same thing: creating new value. Each runs on a playbook of strategies and assumptions that brought success in the past. But playbooks begin to break when conditions shift.
A pandemic changes everything overnight.
New technology rewrites the rules.
Social and political divides fracture a nation.
Clinging to the old playbook leads to a stall. Abandoning it entirely leads to chaos. The real skill is in adapting together when the old rules begin to rupture.
“Move fast and break things” may work for software, but humans don’t break the same way. For us humans, being here in America in 2025, demands that we can work together in teams to metabolize uncertainty into differentiated growth and human-AI co-creation advantage. Across difference. Under pressure.
It’s what I’ve coined: Hard Creativity. It’s more important than ever, yet our systems do little to measure or reward it.
Hard Creativity is what distributed creative teams that support fighter pilots, Olympians, surgeons, Broadway stars, and unicorn startup founders rely on every single day. The arena changes, but the pattern holds: diverse teams, high stakes, shared trust, shared story, real-time improvisation.
The Discovery Deficit
Humans are explorers by nature. In “discovery mode,” our senses heighten, our attention sharpens, and possibility feels alive.
Most workplaces rarely reach this state. We live with a Discovery Deficit.
The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Jobs Report placed creativity, adaptability, empathy, curiosity, and resilience at the top of the list of future work skills. Yet organizations continue to optimize for efficiency and output. Productivity becomes the goal, while the muscles of shared discovery atrophy.
And here’s an even bigger question for leaders: how are we preparing our future fighter pilots, Olympians, surgeons, artists, founders, and explorers of every kind, not just for productivity, but for discovery?
How are we training them for cognitive agility, emotional navigation, collaboration, and machine mastery?
Because without those, fractured futures become the default.
From Friction to Fuel
Sensing that America was beginning to lose its sense of wonder, I embarked on a two-year national listening tour, asking hundreds of leaders in dozens of states what was holding back their creativity.
Across sectors, the answers were consistent:
Fear: fast technology, slow brains. Creativity suffers.
Frustration: emotional misalignment shuts down innovation.
Fragmentation: teams can execute on what’s known but struggle to imagine what’s next.
Flatness: meaning collapses and sameness takes over.
Left unaddressed, these frictions stall progress. When metabolized, they become the raw material for growth:
Fear becomes Minds, cognitive agility.
Frustration becomes Motivation, emotional resilience.
Fragmentation becomes Momentum, coordinated know-how.
Flatness becomes Machine Mastery, human–AI agency.
Together, these four vectors form Creative Brain Capital, a measurable index of a team’s capacity to turn uncertainty into differentiated value and then take action before it’s too late.
A Place of Peak Performance
Colorado Springs is a place that knows how to live at the edge of frontiers. From the Olympic and Paralympic movement, to the Space Foundation and the legendary Pikes Peak, this community knows how to train people to perform at their peak under pressure.
Combined with UCCS, the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce, a vibrant arts community, and growing tech and aerospace sectors, Colorado Springs is positioned to become the hub for training, measuring, and growing America’s Creative Brain Capital, with UCCS serving as the coordinating organization for a national partnership movement shaping the future of creative work.
This cross-sector partnership movement between culture and commerce is built around five investment tracks:
Partnerships to build trust and shared language across industry and academic silos.
Priorities to identify grand challenges where arts leadership and creativity science meet industry R&D.
People to develop pipelines for roles machines cannot take on.
Pilots to create real-world proof points that metabolize friction into measurable outcomes.
Performance to translate creativity science into actionable intelligence for driving economic growth.
Next week’s kick-off event marks the launch of a year-long countdown to the inaugural Wonder Economy Leadership & Investor Summit (October 9-10, 2026).
In celebrating America’s 250th and Colorado’s 150th, the 2026 summit will become a national stage for reimagining, leading, and investing in the frontier of creative work around a central, driving question:
What if AI is America’s big chance to make the HARD CREATIVITY of innovation more human than ever before?
Our Big Beyond Is Within
To answer this driving question, we have identified Six Wonder Frontiers. These human grand challenge areas balance an outer horizon of science and technology with an inner frontier of human creative potential:
Beyond Maps — curiosity and stewardship in space and ocean discovery.
Beyond Body — resilient improvisation of bodies and brains under pressure.
Beyond Mind — deploying moral imagination, emotion, and spirituality as a balance for logic.
Beyond Technology — embedding the full spectrum of human wisdom into AI, quantum, and biotech.
Beyond Art — positioning artists as integral for discovery on every innovation team, everywhere.
Beyond Language — building coherence in an era of broken stories and fragmented narratives.
A Shared Story
Innovation is a story we tell about how we move from where we are to where we want to be. Without a shared story, creativity withers. Without meaning, even the most efficient system collapses under pressure.
Our most uncharted territory in the decade ahead, the biggest source of untapped value, is not out there somewhere; it is within us. It is already within us.
The big beyond is not a place we go; it is a capacity we unlock together when we choose to LEAD WITH WONDER!
Work like artists
Observe like researchers
Navigate like entrepreneurs
Design like nature
Explore like humans
Radiate like stardust.
To lead with wonder means engaging in a collective act of courageous imagination as we work together to deploy a scientific prototype, pair it with artist-led interventions to understand its market value, and launch a sustainable long-term strategy for the future of creative work. Ensuring our technology is built with a more complete and equitable understanding of the human experience.
The Invitation
We are building a cause.
To make creativity the currency of progress.
To design teams that metabolize friction into discovery.
To create a future where tools serve humanity rather than the reverse.
If you’re in Colorado next week, we want you to be part of co-creating the future of creative work. Wonder out loud is a powerful thing! It is our greatest human resource for discovery. The question is, how loud can we make it?
The idea here is to find better ways to strike a balance between the old and the new so that we can benefit from both.
This is the work. The future of creative work.
Final Call for Registration
HOW TO REGISTER
Register here to join us at this fully in-person event.
A nominal donation of $50 is requested, with 100% of the proceeds going to student innovation scholarships in the C3 Innovation Lab. To offer options, you can also use code DISCOUNT25 to choose the $25 donation point. Don’t miss this opportunity to co-create this transformative movement.
WHEN
October 9, 2025, 1-4p p.m. with a reception to follow
LOCATION
University of Colorado Colorado Springs
Ent Center for the Arts at UCCS
5225 N. Nevada Avenue
Colorado Springs, CO 80918
Expand Your Arts Experience at Our Venue
Theatreworks currently has an incredible production of Cabaret playing. Get tickets here.
GOCA offers some exceptional visual arts experiences in its galleries. Learn more here
Other Places to Connect With Me
Business & Innovation: Culture Futurist®Substack
The Place: UCCS C3 Innovation
The Movement: Creativity America
Personal Hub: Culture Futurist