Book excerpt: Across rural America there are disruptive leaders who are finding the courage to ignite their small local communities with creativity, ingenuity, scrappiness, and collaboration despite political, racial, or religious differences. By combining skills, experience, and culture heritage, they are successfully igniting their own creative economies. Many of these communities are providing products and services to much larger urban areas and are thriving in international trade. In addition, they have capitalized their own unique cultural heritage and have developed a bustling tourism industry. All have developed events, public art, fine arts, music, theater, and technology to create a modern new local enlightenment. Developing Creative Economy Through Disruptive Leadership: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a collection of innovative research that explores strategies for reinventing and rebuilding creative economies. While highlighting topics such as entrepreneurism, social media, and branding, the research within this book is based on the interviews and analysis of fifteen state agencies that are a mixture of rural, semi-urban, and urban, and are all quite different in culture and diversity. This publication is ideally designed for community leaders, government officials, policymakers, entrepreneurs, educators, researchers, academicians, and students.