Walnut St. Labs: West Chester incubator and coworking space launches [PHOTOS]

If your community doesn’t have what you want in it, start creating.

That was the thinking behind Walnut St. Labs, a new West Chester incubator and coworking space from entrepreneur Chris Dima.

A little under a decade ago, Dima, 40, tired of commuting to Philadelphia for his job as an adult education teacher, decided to take any job he could that was walking distance from his house. That happened to be at Economy.com, which later sold in 2005 to Moody’s for $27 million. Dima’s been working in startups — only within walking distance from his house — ever since.

He’s launching this new space to make it easier for others to do the same.

The 2,000 square foot space currently hosts seven companies, two of which Dima cofounded. At about 12 people, the space is nearly halfway full. Dima hopes to turn the space into an actual incubator that offers startup resources.

In recent years, suburbanites have been building coworking spaces and incubators of their own, and Walnut St. Labs is another example of this. There’s Business Casual Coworking in Bucks County, the Dream Factory in Phoenixville and Novotorium in Langhorne.