Design Contest Winner Jon Sumroy Shares Success Story
The Create the Future Design Contest was launched in 2002 by the publishers of Tech Briefs magazine to help stimulate and reward engineering innovation. Jon Sumroy, founder and CEO of mifold and winner of the 2016 Consumer Products Category, shares his success story. Transportation is changing, and car seats must adapt. The mifold grab-and-go car seat is helping to save children’s lives. Read an interview with Sumroy here, and view his winning design contest entry here .
Transcript
00:00:03 number of households in America that own car seats has decreased for three years in a row and this is the first time in a hundred years that the number of households with cars have decreased and why is it because of car sharing and ride-hailing and other relative new innovative new business models we're just starting to make their mark people no longer need the car in order to get
00:00:29 the transportation and we are on the threshold of this wonderful world of fleets of autonomous vehicles driving around by themselves and we'll just hop in and out I mean it's wonderful transportation is changing but car sees for children arms and in this brave new world the car seat can't stay with the car the car seat has to stay with the child and to do that they have to be
00:00:57 compact and portable when we think of the greatest challenges that are threatening us humanity I'm sure we all think about poverty and hunger pollution and the climate or disease inequality but one of the number one killers of children in the world today accident about our rental car slid off one side of the road to the other believed involved before landing on the
00:01:22 driver's side it was totaled we all got out of the top hasn't assigned the car it was definitely scary experience but our daughter Dahlia was fine thank you my fault it landed at JFK we had an accident on the highway on the way to the city two of the four cars were a total loss but nothing happened to our kids
00:01:44 I now know without a shadow of a doubt that my kids were saved because they won't be placed in these diseases and always wondered how would my phone stand up to a wreck I'm now a hundred percent confident it works my babies are safe I wanted to make this for me so that my children could be safe it just didn't matter whose car they were in I never imagined that what I was doing would
00:02:11 touch the lives of so many people you guys you thought all this success three years later my company is about to deliver the one millionth car seats it meant a lot for me and for my company everybody in the company when the people at tech briefs identified us as a company that would change the future but it turns out of the one we got the award the award in 2016 we weren't changing
00:02:47 the future in 2016 all we were doing was solving a problem of the past my problem taxes vacations and things like that but today I'm truly pleased to be able to stand here today in 2019 we are leading the world in creating solutions that truly will solve the problems of creating the future you