North Carolina has long been an epicenter of pioneering research, tech, and academic institutes. Yet what ignites innovation is our state’s collaborative spirit - with diverse industries coming together to create category-disrupting solutions.
Take the blockbuster LEGO x Fortnite team-up, fusing physical and virtual play. These giants from Billund, Denmark, and Cary, North Carolina, built the ultimate playscape, bridging real and digital worlds by uniting Fortnite’s metaverse mastery with LEGO’s universal charm and creativity. Kids can now craft real-life Lego builds that get imported into Fortnite adventures, blending hands-on fun with next-gen gameplay. It’s an unprecedented expansion unlocking new dimensions for both brands.
The LEGO Group’s mission is to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow through the power of play.
I love that example of the LEGO Group's "why." If it feels like we are at the beginning of a trend where collaborations between real and virtual worlds happen at an ever-increasing rate, I agree.
Or look at IBM and Red Hat's "Mesh Cloud," melding the best public, private, and edge computing into a flexible cloud solution. This distributed model tackles pain points like security, scalability, and complexity while enabling businesses to manage apps across any environment. It's decentralized innovation at its finest and poised to shake up the cloud ecosystem we've come to depend on, incorporate into websites and apps, and plumb our software as a service (SaaS) and network as a service (NaaS) future.
Collaborations like Epic, LEGO, IBM, and Red Hat create a "sum is greater than the parts" collaboration. These boundary-breaking cases only hint at the wave of game-changing collaborations happening statewide. It's the kind of magic that happens when generous minds come together. North Carolina's collaborative spirit will continue to catapult its position as a global innovation trailblazer. Where else could rivals become collaborators? Challenges morph into unlimited possibilities? These are only a few examples of how a state's pioneering perspective can change everything.