After being named the fastest growing startup scene in the world by Pitchbook in 2025, Nashville still has the reputation of being "music city" or a city focused on healthcare administration. The Nashville Innovation Alliance, a collaborative effort between Vanderbilt University and the Nashville Mayor’s Office, wanted to tell a different story of Nashville innovation and do it the way this city does everything: together.

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This was the basis for the Cowrite the Future campaign, a multi-year civic campaign that reveals, connects and celebrates the people building the future in Nashville. We developed the campaign from the first stakeholder conversation to telling the stories of the people building the future of Nashville in the campaign.

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The Challenge

Nashville is known for its music and hospitality. It is a great place to visit, friendly and innovative in its own right, but not typically thought of as cutting-edge. There is a whole ecosystem of founders, researchers, creatives and more working together in unique ways that can’t be found in many other large cities. But almost nobody knows about it.

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There was a second problem. No single organization owned the story of the Nashville startup ecosystem. Many organizations, from universities to startups, from funders to civic groups, each had their own priorities and their own version of the pitch to attract companies and talent to the city. The campaign for the whole ecosystem had to be something that all of these organizations would use, and it couldn’t treat the city’s music identity as a liability. It had to build on it.

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Our Approach

We began the work for Cowrite the Future by listening to the Nashville startup, tech and innovation community. We spent about a year in research and consensus building with the many people, organizations and entities that comprise this growing ecosystem.

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That thing was creativity + collaboration. Nashville doesn’t win on scale or capital. It wins on connection and creation. Leaders and sectors here are unusually close to each other, and that proximity generates ideas faster. It became the core of the story: Nashville is the most creative, the most collaborative place in America to build and scale innovative ideas.

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The name for the campaign came from a Nashville habit. For decades, songwriters have sat around a table to cowrite songs, bringing different perspectives to the table in order to create something better than any one person could write on their own. We wanted to take that same ritual and apply it to everything else going on in Nashville.

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• Research & Consensus: A year of conversations across the ecosystem to find the shared truth and build alignment before a single pixel was designed.
• Messaging: A core narrative, five guiding themes, and plain-language talking points that partners can make their own.
• Visual Identity: Black and bright Sunshine yellow, hand-drawn ovals that point at what matters, and handwritten “innovation nouns” that finish the sentence: Cowrite the future of flight. Of precision medicine. Of startups. Everyone who joins gets to fill in their own blank.
• Partner Toolkit: A working guide for sponsors, institutions, and spokespeople covering what to post, when to co-post, and how to feature each other’s logos.
• Website: A home for the stories, events, and invitations to get involved.
• Creative Direction: We are currently producing a series of episodic video profiles of some of Nashville’s most innovative companies and people, including HeroWear, Giggs, Adele Health, Soundstripe, and Whisper Aero. All of the videos feature real people doing real work in Nashville, and are kept as specific as possible.

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