GIVING HEART & SOUL … AND THEN SOME The 34th Entrepreneur of Year Awards Celebrate Kansas City Innovators By Kelsey Haynes
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n true Bloch fashion, the 34th Entrepreneur of the Year Awards, hosted by the Regnier Institute of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, was celebratory of the collaborative work it takes to turn dreams into reality. The event, held November 15 in Bloch Executive Hall, noted how the legacy of Henry Bloch lives on through the lives of others and within Kansas City. “In the past few years, we’ve been saying, ‘Let’s make Kansas City America’s most entrepreneurial city,’ and we’ve worked together to make that happen,” said UMKC Innovation Center executive director Maria Meyers, the Marion and John Kreamer Awardee for Social Entrepreneurship. Meyers founded SourceLink, a repository of resources for local entrepreneurs that has been replicated across the nation. Many of the 2019 honorees shed light on their climbs to success, the leaps of faith it took to get their ideas off the ground and the support from the Kansas City community to persevere. “There’s a long-existing theory that suggests when you dream out loud — when you speak your ideas into the universe — they are more likely to come back to you,” said Tom Bloch, who introduced the Cerner co-founders as the Henry W. Bloch International Entrepreneurs of the Year. “We could say that’s what happened for Cerner co-founders and Entrepreneur Hall of Fame inductees Neal Patterson, Paul Gorup and Cliff Illig.”
