In a city where there's currency in staying put, Candice Langston might be forgiven for turning her back on Charlotte.

After all, she was just an '80s kid swept up by the fashion in British Vogue, the sound of British Invasion bands and a need for a good trans-Atlantic makeover.

"I was too big for Charlotte," says Langston, 42, sipping latte in a Dilworth coffeehouse and chuckling at the inflated self-view. "I couldn't wait to go somewhere else."

The daughter of a tobacco worker sure landed herself in high cotton. After a stint in marketing at Chanel, she rose up the executive ranks at Christie's and Sotheby's art auction houses in London and New York, where she hobnobbed with Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Richard Ford.

Yet these days she's most fascinated by Charlotte, or more specifically, its rising, emboldened creative class.

"There's a shift here moving from the old-guard leadership that made Charlotte what it is today to a new group of creative thinkers," she says. "And to them, power to make change is less about 'How much money do you have in the bank?' and more about 'What is your intellectual capital base?'"

Langston, with a band of volunteers, is setting the stage for some of the area's most creative thinkers by hosting TEDxCharlotte, the city's Sept. 24 version of a Silicon Valley thinkfest.

As the inaugural conference's chief organizer, she will give voice to decidedly "out-of-the-box" locals - from a self-taught mathematician to a world-renowned sculptor of twigs and branches, to a New Urbanism architect.

Langston views her role as an important extension of a career spent at the intersection of commerce and creativity - where often the brightest ideas are overlooked.

"We've gone out of our way to have presenters that everyone hasn't heard from," she says. "We want to give voice to ideas that feel like fresh territory."

In case you're not familiar, TED (technology, entertainment and design) is the wildly popular global nonprofit devoted to delivering "ideas worth spreading."

The conference was started in the early '80s by California techies as a one-time deal, but has since exploded into an intellectual crusade in which the world's biggest thinkers serve up their biggest "change the world" ideas in a strict 18 minutes or less.

While seen as a bit New Age and flaky to some, TED's conferences have lured the likes of Bill Gates, Jane Goodall and Bill Clinton.

When TED decided to launch local versions of the conference a couple of years ago, Langston applied and, after a rigorous certification process, got the nod to host in Charlotte.

Most agree that the timing couldn't be better.

"The economic downturn has caused some people to rethink our future," says Jeff Michael, director of UNC Charlotte's Urban Institute. "People are asking 'Have we relied too much on banking and traditional industries?' and 'What should we be thinking about next?"

He adds: "It would be going too far to say that we're becoming Portland or San Francisco or Boston, but we're certainly a lot further than we were two or three years ago about being receptive to new ideas. People here are looking for answers."

Of course, until a few years ago, many city leaders sought answers in the theories of academics such as Richard Florida, who posited in his popular book, "The Rise of the Creative Class," that urban economic vitality was rooted in attracting a young, hip and educated class of 20-somethings with a slew of cultural amenities. But those ideas have mostly fizzled, while suburbs and family-oriented cities such as Charlotte became viewed as models for growth and even a magnet for creatives such as artists, programmers, and architects.

"The underlying economic times are more serious than how cool the coffeehouse is down the street," says Kenneth Paulus, a 33-year-old vice president of business development for Enventys, the Charlotte-based product design and engineering firm. "Still, anybody who says that the Charlotte area isn't creative isn't looking hard enough."

As proof, Langston points to her 16 TEDxCharlotte innovators. They include Tim Will, a retired telecom exec whose nonprofit, Foothills Connect, is working to bring broadband technology to impoverished, rural areas in Rutherford County.

"What Tim is doing is pretty amazing; he's even taught some farmers how to read," she says. "What good is the Internet if you can't read?"

Langston moved from New York to Charlotte in 2002. Until a couple of years ago, she was busy building her own business, Potion, a retailer of upscale cosmetics with three Charlotte locations. She sold the company in 2008 (it has since closed), and shifted her energy to nonprofits such as Time Out Youth, where she works as director of development.

"I view her as a Richard Florida prototype," says Cyndee Patterson, president of the Lee Institute, who met Langston during fundraising work for the Duke Mansion and Bechtler Museum, where Patterson serves as chair. "She's got organizational skills and she's got a creative mind, which is rare to find in one person."

But Langston believes such types aren't so rare at all - and she hopes TEDxCharlotte, which weeks ago hit its maximum of 300 participants, is a step toward bringing them to the city's forefront.

"I'm just hoping to start some conversations, and connect some people," she says. "In this city, ideas are sometimes marginalized because they didn't come from somebody with an MBA or 30 years of work experience at a bank. We might bring a flair, but we're not quite part of the corporate culture yet."