How do you express the character of a place as diverse as Georgia Tech?

After grappling with that question for years, Tech has — through a recent collaboration of staff, students, faculty, and leadership — created a single powerful message that unifies all of our work: Creating the Next. The message expresses Tech’s core purpose of making the world a better place by creating the next idea, the next technology, and the next legion of agile minds — bound together with the passion and skills to imagine and build our future.

“Creating the Next differentiates Tech in our national landscape as a place deeply committed to inspiring students to imagine what they could achieve on campus and well beyond,” says Rick Clark, director of Undergraduate Admission.

Initially featured in the 2015 Institute Address, Creating the Next was quickly adopted by many parts of campus.

The key to introducing the idea was to have people see themselves in it and feel that it reflected who they were and what they did. Since then, the Creating the Next tagline has been appearing in news articles, feature stories, on the Tech website, and even in the title of the Commission on Creating the Next in Education.

Based on extensive research focused on Georgia Tech’s key stakeholders and interviews with Georgia Tech’s leadership, Creating the Next was developed to amplify Tech’s unique value, create increased awareness and understanding of our work, and bring stability and direction to one of our most valuable assets: our reputation.

“Our reputation is built not only through hard work and dedication to our motto of Progress and Service, but also through clear and consistent communication with our students, our partners, and the friends of the Institute. When we speak, act, and perform as ‘One Georgia Tech,’ the entire Institute benefits,” says President G.P. “Bud” Peterson.  

One Message, Three Pillars

Creating the Next not only communicates our overarching mission of innovation, it also speaks to our work ethic and value. Three unique characteristics that set Georgia Tech apart from our peers include our collaborative and open-minded culture, our can-do attitude, and our worth as an investment for students and partners. By consistently weaving these key messages into our content, we remind audiences about our distinctive traits.

• Unbound: We’re unbound by limitations, expectations, or stereotypes, making it easy to embrace fresh thinking and perspectives, and freeing us to be daring as we seek new answers.
• Inventive and Industrious: We’re inventive and industrious in our approach to any problem, drawing on the necessary expertise, thinking, and tools to come up with solutions that have an amazingly broad spectrum of application.
• Real-World Returns: We’re focused on return on investment (ROI) in all that we do, which means preparing our people and our solutions to have immediate application and demand in the real world.

Making it Personal

Most message architectures are fairly rigid, but not Tech’s.

The tagline was designed so that the entire campus could see themselves in it. The campus is encouraged to personalize Creating the Next to reflect what they do by filling in the blank as topic-appropriate (e.g. Creating the Next Clean Energy Source, Creating the Next Medical Breakthrough, Creating the Next Green Campus). This open approach facilitates the fact that the diverse community of students, staff, and faculty at Georgia Tech contributes to making the world a better place. 

To learn more about Creating the Next, visit gatech.edu/creating-next or comm.gatech.edu/resources/brand.