The Center for Creative Economy began as a program of the Piedmont Triad Partnership (PTP) where CCE founder, Margaret Collins, served as the Director of Creative Economy. There she organized Triad creative leaders  to establish a Creative Economy Initiative throughout the 12 county Piedmont region in NC. This effort was made possible with support from the WIRED grant funded by the U.S. Department of Labor.

To ensure the momentum would not be lost from its early success, the Center for Creative Economy was established as an independent non-profit organization in 2011.

CCE based itself in Winston-Salem, NC, and built upon the programs established at PTP in order to connect and grow regional creative businesses. These included Triad Design Leadershop, a series of Design Thinking keynotes and workshops; Design Link, a collective of regional design teams collaborating with city agencies, non-profits, and private companies to solve design-based problems in our communities; and Swerve, a hub for creatives to gather, network and learn at monthly meetups, with an online directory.

Since 2011, CCE has created and launched programs which address the lack of inception stage business training available for creatives and artists.

CCE launched its first creative business accelerator in 2016 in collaboration with Creative Startups in Albuquerque. This program provides the business development tools that creatives need to be successful. After 3 years of hosting the accelerator, CCE launched  its own curriculum and rebranded as the Velocity creative accelerator in 2019.  Also in 2019, CCE renamed the Swerve program to Momentum to reflect our focus on company growth.

In 2020, CCE launched the Kinetic boot camp for creatives and artists in the idea stage of development. Kinetic provides the basic tools of customer discovery, business model and financial forecasting to get you started on the right foot.

CCE educates and provides customized mentoring to fulfill our mission to Launch, Grow and Accelerate creative entrepreneurs and businesses. From Kinetic to Momentum to Velocity, we cover the early stages of business development and growth from pre inception, and inception to market validation and traction. We collaborate with numerous partners throughout the Piedmont Triad,  North Carolina, and nationally.