As many rural areas have lost the competitive advantage they once depended on in the form of lower labor and business costs, natural resources and land, economic developers have sought strategies that can sustainably support growth and revitalization. Place-based economic development has been a promising pathway for many communities. While existing scholarship emphasizes the inward-looking, grassroots aspects of such strategies, they need not be seen as exclusively local and indigenous. This case study explores how the STARworks Center for Creative Enterprise in Montgomery County, North Carolina has embraced a place-based strategy that successfully interweaves investing local resources to grow both existing small businesses and carefully recruited outside entrepreneurs in its quest to diversify the local economic base and achieve long-term stability and prosperity. Due to its specific focus on creative businesses, STARworks also presents an opportunity to consider how the generation of economic activity through culture, knowledge and ideas, part of the emerging theory of the creative economy, evolves at the local scale.