Sometimes all it takes is one good idea to spark a new business, a new opportunity, a different future.

To help foster those ideas, Troy University is investing in a new IDEA Bank, a center focused on helping students become entrepreneurs.

The university’s foundation recently purchased the former Regions Bank building in downtown Troy with plans to move the Small Business Development Center into the building and create an Innovation Design Entrepreneurship Accelerator (IDEA).

The vision of partnering the business incubator with the SBDC is a smart one, born of the work the SBDC does throughout southeastern Alabama. The SBDC’s singular goal is helping small businesses get off the ground and succeed, and in doing so the center has helped open nearly 90 new start businesses, create more than 490 jobs and secure $250 million worth of federal contracts in the past five years.

Expanding that center to reach college students and foster their natural entrepreneurial spirit makes good sense. Some of the most successful businesses that exist today were created by college students: Facebook, Modcloth, Reddit, Kinko’s, The Onion, Def Jam Records, SnapChat and dozens more.

Closer to home, Troy students have started online shops, photography businesses, graphic design businesses, even a spice company. For young adults in college, the future is filled with possibilities and potential. And the students who have the idea, the drive and the willingness to work now will have a center to help lend support and guidance as they test out those ideas and concepts.

It’s an exciting venture, one that benefits not only the students, but our community as a whole.

We can’t wait to see what good ideas come from the center.