The Register-Herald, Beckley, West Virginia

Editorials

September 23, 2011

Opportunity

The Register-Herald

With all of our leaders’ talk about the diversification of West Virginia’s economy, one option promoted by Northup Information Services certainly deserves some attention.

The company advocates the development of high-tech businesses by local residents in rural areas and small towns. They offer seminars to companies and individuals with advice on pursuing a high-tech career. President and founder of the company Zac Northup thinks companies eyeing undeveloped markets in other countries are overlooking the potential in their own backyard.

“In terms of technology and jobs and economic development, a vast majority of the United States is an undeveloped market,” he said during an interview with The Register-Herald.

Often, those in rural markets fail to see the potential for high-tech products, services and software, but with broadband access slowly expanding into even the most remote corners of West Virginia’s landscape, leaders and citizens should place a higher value on the area’s potential in the technology sector.

Leaders can get a leg up on this trend by offering some of the same incentives to Internet companies that they offer to more traditional, brick-and-mortar companies. But, as Northup pointed out, it’s not all about attracting existing businesses to locate within the state.

“I don’t think you have to worry about high-tech companies coming to locate in Beckley,” he said. “I think there are people in Beckley who are probably capable of building their own high-tech business.”

So it’s not all up to our leaders. It requires some hard work, ingenuity and self-confidence on our part to put our own, homegrown ideas out into the tech world.

Local and state leaders need to discourage companies from outsourcing tech jobs and incentivize the in-sourcing of jobs back to the United States and West Virginia, in particular. And our tech-savvy residents should start to put some of their previously discarded ideas into practice.

You never know what might happen.

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Editorials