What makes a creative studio future-ready?

Digital worlds used to live in clear boxes. Films were films. Games were games. Brand experiences were something totally different. 

But now those boxes don’t really exist anymore. A blockbuster film lays the groundwork for an interactive experience. A game engine can power live events. A brand activation can borrow the language of science fiction. Audiences move between these spaces freely, and increasingly expect them to feel coherent. 

So creative studios have to consider what it means to be future-ready when the future is fragmented across formats. 

We wanted to find out how studios can do that. So we asked David Sheldon-Hicks (Founder at Territory Studio), because his work sits at the crossroads of film, games, technology, and design.

Defining ‘future-ready’ in a converging world 

We asked Sheldon-Hicks to define a future-ready creative studio, and he outlined a mindset – one shaped by convergence rather than specialism: 

• Multidisciplinary by default – “not siloed into ‘film,’ ‘games,’ or ‘brand,’ but fluid across them.”
• Technologically literate – “embracing real-time engines, AI-assisted workflows, procedural tools, and collaborative cloud pipelines.”
• Driven by worldbuilding – “understanding that IP lives across formats, and that narrative consistency matters as much as visual execution.”
• Built for scale and speed – “able to support complex productions while innovating at the experimental edges.”

None of these qualities are tied to a specific medium. They’re structural; because being future-ready is less about predicting which platform will boom next, and more about building teams and systems that can move as platforms evolve.

Why multidisciplinary thinking has become a critical skill

Across industries, the same pattern is emerging: tools, workflows, and audiences are converging fast, and organisations have to keep up. 

Real-time engines once associated primarily with games are now standard in virtual production, while AI tools that began as experimental are increasingly embedded in everyday creative workflows. And cloud collaboration has turned geographically distributed teams into a default, not an exception.

Studios that are too rigid, and separate themselves by discipline or legacy pipeline, are more likely to struggle to respond at speed. The ones that are ready (even, dare we say it, excited) for overlap tend to adapt more smoothly.

So as we move into 2026, multidisciplinary teams are a resilience strategy. 

Territory’s approach: investing before it’s comfortable

Territory’s evolution reflects this long-range thinking.

“At Territory, we stay ahead by investing early in emerging disciplines,” Sheldon-Hicks said. “We moved into real-time design years before it became standard.”

That early investment is important because new tools don’t arrive fully formed. Studios that wait for best practices to be standardised often arrive after the cultural language has already been set. When you adopt early, your team gets to experiment and figure out how tools can be used – without all the marketing noise that tells you what you should (and shouldn’t) use them for. 

Worldbuilding as infrastructure

Another defining element Sheldon-Hicks highlights is worldbuilding as its own kind of structural logic.

“We built a dedicated team around worldbuilding, narrative logic, and system design.”

This reflects a broader shift in how digital experiences are designed. As intellectual property stretches across films, games, live experiences, and branded environments, consistency becomes a technical problem as much as a creative one.

Worldbuilding, in this sense, acts like infrastructure. It ensures that no matter where an audience enters (a cinema screen, a headset, or a physical space) the rules of the world hold together.

Meeting audiences where they already are

Future-readiness also means letting go of assumptions about where creative work belongs. 

“We’ve expanded into experiential, branding, and interactive spaces to meet audiences where they live, not where legacy pipelines assume they’ll be.”

This is particularly relevant for tech-literate audiences, who move seamlessly between entertainment, work, and play – often on the same device, and sometimes in the same hour.

Studios that design for lived behaviour, rather than inherited categories, are better positioned to stay culturally relevant.

Collaboration as a competitive advantage

Finally, Sheldon-Hicks points to collaboration as a strategic necessity. 

“And importantly, we keep collaborating – with technologists, studios, game developers, and research labs.”

We love this; it’s something we talk about all the time at LEAP. Because as creative work becomes more technically complex, no single studio can hold all the expertise in-house. The most resilient organisations are those that build strong external networks and learn fluently across disciplines.

“The future belongs to hybrid thinkers, and we’re structuring Territory around that principle.”

That’s the key takeaway here for technologists, creatives, and enthusiasts alike. The future of digital worlds won’t be built by specialists defending their territory – and in fact, those specialists risk falling behind the curve. It’s the hybrid studios that cross territories that will build diverse digital worlds in the years to come. 

So, like a well-designed world, a future-ready studio has to be internally consistent, structurally flexible, and open to expansion. The rules are still helpful – but only if they leave room for change.