After 10 years of interviews with professionals who work across creative and business sectors, the author has drawn together findings in this article to encourage a collapsing of silos between schools and workplaces so that educators can build on untapped expertise from professionals who work and think multimodally. This call for change involves adopting alternative, age-old models of learning such as studio pedagogy where learning is modeled and framed by professionals and then practiced and honed by learners with access to materials and resources in a designated creative, thinking, experimentation space. In this article, historical models, and existing literature on creativity, innovation and play are examined; and telling case studies are presented from interviews with 61 professionals to encourage researchers and policy-makers to adopt a studio-atelier approach to teaching and learning.