LAST WEEK in The Gazette, we had a story on Emporians Lee Alderman and John McCoy, who are getting ready to release the LaunchPad, a new chair designed for NBA basketball players. Will the product take off and be an international success? Time will tell. But it certainly looks as if it has potential.
What makes this story interesting is the collaboration between McCoy and Alderman. Alderman had an interesting idea and marketing savvy and McCoy was able to engineer it and make it work.
This story is inspiring and should remind us that something as simple as a chair can be refined to spawn a new business.
Our community has some great inventive minds and over the years, names like Didde, Hopkins, Finlay, Sauder, Glaser and others have collaborated to create products that have circled the world.
Because of those collaborations, they have grown some of our community’s best businesses, which in turn has grown our community.
The question becomes: Should our community be doing more to help foster new business ideas locally? It would seem to serve our community well to hold regular forums where people could bring their ideas and share them with Emporia’s great inventors and see if their concepts are possible.
In recent years, recruiting new businesses to town has been challenging as other communities have aggressively stepped up their recruitment efforts. We need to continue to try and lure companies to Emporia but we should not overlook great ideas that might be right in our own backyard.
Incubating and growing more businesses in our community may be the key to a bright future.