COIN Summit 2015 is coming up incredibly fast and we’re getting more excited for it than ever as we continue to plan our coverage of the big event. We’re not alone.

Earlier this year, Anna Ewing took on the role executive director of the Colorado Innovation Network. Today, her excitement for experiencing her first ever COIN Summit is through the roof.

As executive director, Ewing has been leading the effort over the past several months—working tirelessly in in the planning of the event, overseeing the day-to-day, and working with stakeholders in the community to ensure that the COIN mission is carried out and really assist in making Colorado the innovative place to be.

We spoke with her recently to find out how that’s been going, what will be different, the same, and what we should be looking forward to:

Innovators Peak: What will be different about this year’s event as opposed to the prior years?

Anna Ewing: The format will be much of the same. It’s two days here in Denver with roughly 300 innovators from across the ecosystem. Our theme this year is CURIOSITY because any innovation really starts with someone posing a question or having some sort of inquisitive thought about how things are done or how things could be done better. So we developed an entire program steeped in the theme of curiosity in four tracks—each a half-day session looking at innovation from different lenses and how it ultimately effects the business community and the broader world in which we live. There certainly is more Colorado focus this year. We have a number of innovators and thought leaders from this state that will be on stage. One of the ultimate aims is to make known what is happening in out state—celebrating innovation in Colorado.

Anna Ewing.

Is this the first year the summit has a theme?

No—it’s always had a theme. But I think this year the theme is more prominent in our marketing materials and how we develop the overall storyboard of the program.

So do you think the theme having a more prominent role will kind of generate more innovation and help make progress happen more efficiently?

I think it absolutely will do just that. Something that I’m quite passionate about is challenging how we think about innovation. It’s a buzzword that is quite frankly used in every conversation whether you’re sitting in a big conference room or reading an article in the media about some new company—so I think this year’s program really ruptures that boundary a little bit.

There’s a pretty significant focus on social impact especially with our last session thinking about how innovation can really impact solutions to our global issues that will ultimately affect all of us. Curiosity is something that everybody can be a part of and experience in their own way. Its everywhere from evolving models of higher education, to thinking about how we tackle philanthropy, how we tackle public-private partnerships, and solve issues at grassroot levels more than ever before. It starts to broaden the conversation and we’ll get some really rich dialogue from our delegation because of that.

Speaking of the delegation—which speakers are you really looking forward to this year?

We’ve got them all listed on our website which would be a good reference for [anyone interested]. But quite frankly I’m excited about all of them. Again we have a lot of Colorado representation this year. We’re structuring it so we’ll be led by four guides in each of those four sections I mentioned before.

We have Tom Higley the founder and CEO of 10.10.10 who will lead the first track on how our digital selves define us.

We’ve got Brian Broyle who is the co-CEO and founder of Issue Media Group who will lead session 2 about how the ways we connect are changing.

Our third guide is Leah Hunter a technology writer at Fast Company. She’s going to lead our third session on what the communities of the future will look like.

And then John Hockenberry of the National Public Radio, an award-winning journalist will be our fourth session leader regarding global progress.

Each of those guides will really thread together the various speakers and talents that participate. I’m incredibly excited about the element that that will bring to the program—really creating a cohesive experience for everyone in the room.

Aside from all of this—what is going to make this year’s Summit the biggest, best, and most effective one yet?

It’s always about the people in the room and the conversations that are had there. I think them combined with this fantastic momentum we have going on in Colorado currently around all things innovation—our economy is doing really well, we’ve got an influx of millennials coming here, we’ve got positive workforce challenges—all of these things wrapped together are going to make for a really rich experience for everybody there.

If I had to pick one thing, it would be what we’re terming our Imagine Colorado crowd challenge. It’s basically an open innovation platform that we’re putting out to the broad Colorado community to try and solve some social impact questions. To our knowledge, it’s the only crowd innovation platform of this nature that happens at the state level. We’re very much looking forward to that—the intellect, the energy, and the innovation of a very broad audience within our community and I think that’s going to have a very big impact and further the dialogue from the summit and far beyond it’s end.

The COIN Summit kicks off in only five days (Aug. 25th). If you don’t know if you’re going by now—you’re not going. Your best bet will be continuing to follow Innovators Peak for exclusive updates and insight to the goings-on of the largest innovation event Colorado will see all year.