Unbridgeable socio-economic and ecological global crises demonstrate the need to challenge the current neoliberal development discourse which links creativity to the primacy of global markets as a factor in place-competition. Despite its lack of validity and empirical support (i.e., Negative Trickle Down, Easterlin Paradox), this economic doctrine dominates contemporary human geography and tourism science. Hence, after briefly reviewing the changing notion of creativity throughout history of thinking, this presentation, first, highlights mainstream economics’ incapability to grasp the nature of creativity. It is shown that creativity possesses the capacity to transform any given economic decision-space characterized by economic theory as mechanistically pre-determined and closed into an undetermined and open cognitive space. Second, as an alternative to Cartesian science ontology inherent to mainstream economic science, Buddhist philosophy is introduced to overcome destructive economic thinking and to deduce the elements of a post-mechanist economic theory. Third, by elaborating on the idea that creativity represents the core economic activity within the boundaries of socio-communicative relationships, empirical network analysis is employed to assess network topologies of European tourism destinations. By applying the network metric Simmelian brokerage, it is shown how network-closure and structural-holes can favor the birth and diffusion of creative mindsets. Findings reveal that European tourism destinations show serious creativity gaps. Finally, the often-overlooked link between creativity and ethics is reflected by considering the intentions of the creator(s) and the consequences of the creative outcome for both the individual creator(s) as well as society at large.