LETTER OF SUPPORT
A Statement of Support for the Innovation Vision for Colorado
Recently, the Human Innovation Institute joined hundreds of Colorado leaders, founders, investors, operators, and community builders in supporting the Innovation Vision for Colorado . We did so because we believe the vision presents an ambitious and important aspiration for the future of our state:
Colorado will be the most attractive innovation ecosystem in the world — and every Coloradan will share in the economic and cultural prosperity that leadership creates.
The most important aspect of this vision is its commitment to ensuring that innovation and shared prosperity advance together. Becoming a world-leading innovation ecosystem is a means of creating opportunity, strengthening communities, expanding participation, and improving the lives of the people who call Colorado home.
A Moment of Profound Change
During a moment when technological change, economic transformation, and increasing complexity are reshaping communities across the world, we believe this vision offers an opportunity to strengthen Colorado's competitiveness while redefining how innovation can serve the broader prosperity and resilience of society.
Colorado's future will be shaped by forces that extend far beyond state borders. Artificial intelligence, technological acceleration, workforce transformation, shifting patterns of capital and talent, and increasing economic complexity are reshaping industries, organizations, and communities across the world. Colorado is experiencing these forces in real time and is not immune to their effects.
In this environment, innovation is how Colorado adapts, creates opportunity, and strengthens its long-term resilience. It is how societies respond to uncertainty, solve emerging challenges, and shape their future.
The Innovation Vision recognizes this reality. While much of the public conversation around innovation focuses on investment, startups, technology, and competitiveness, the deeper opportunity is to strengthen Colorado's ability to navigate change itself. The communities, organizations, and economies that thrive in the decades ahead will be those capable of learning, adapting, and collaborating as the world around them evolves.
Colorado's history demonstrates that innovation emerges when people respond creatively to new challenges and opportunities. The next chapter of Colorado's success will require that same spirit of adaptation, renewal, and shared purpose.
The Foundation for the Innovation Vision Is Intact
The Innovation Vision begins with a remarkable foundation. Colorado has become a recognized center of entrepreneurship, research, technology, and innovation, with strengths spanning aerospace, quantum technology, artificial intelligence, energy, life sciences, and a growing number of emerging industries. Its universities, federal laboratories, founders, investors, business leaders, and civic institutions have helped create one of the most dynamic innovation ecosystems in the country, if not the world.
Yet the very existence of this vision reflects an important reality: these strengths should not be taken for granted. The conditions that helped establish Colorado as a destination for innovators, entrepreneurs, talent, and investment are facing increasing pressure from technological disruption, growing competition among states and regions, rising costs, workforce challenges, policy uncertainty, and shifting patterns of capital and migration. Colorado's innovation leadership remains strong, but maintaining and extending that leadership will require intentional effort.
These strengths extend well beyond a collection of industries, organizations, and technologies. They are the product of decades of collaboration among people and institutions working toward a shared future. Colorado's innovation leadership emerged from a culture that encouraged ambitious people to build, experiment, contribute, give first, and solve problems together. It was not, and will not be, created by any single company, sector, institution, or policy decision.
Innovation ecosystems are ultimately built through human collaboration.
The vision of becoming the most attractive innovation ecosystem in the world will require renewing that collaborative spirit for a new era. Innovation ecosystems emerge when entrepreneurs, researchers, educators, investors, public leaders, and communities align around opportunities larger than any one organization can achieve alone.
Visioning the Future
The next chapter of Colorado's innovation story will require continued investment, technological advancement, and economic growth. It will also require people, organizations, institutions, and communities to collaborate in new ways as the challenges and opportunities facing the state continue to evolve.
The opportunity before Colorado is to cultivate a modern culture of collaborative innovation capable of sustaining leadership through periods of transformation and ensuring that the benefits of innovation reach every corner of the state.
The founders of the Human Innovation Institute intentionally chose to establish the Institute in Boulder because it sits at the intersection of many of the qualities that have made Colorado a globally recognized center of innovation: entrepreneurship, research excellence, frontier technologies, thoughtful leadership, and a culture that encourages ambitious people to build together. We have experienced firsthand the collaborative spirit that has helped distinguish Colorado's innovation community for decades and believe it remains one of the state's greatest strategic assets.
Colorado has an opportunity to become a global leader in innovation that demonstrates how innovation leadership can strengthen opportunity, resilience, prosperity, and participation across an entire society.
We support the Innovation Vision because we believe collaborative innovation is the mechanism through which Colorado can adapt to change, create opportunity, and ensure that the prosperity generated by innovation is broadly shared.
If Colorado succeeds, it will not simply become a model for innovation. It will become a model for how communities navigate change together.
Signed,
Tommy Knoll and Joss Warburton: Co-Founders
Joseph Logan: Strategic Advisor
Monday, June 22, 2026
