Video from KCPTOnline on YouTube.
Following the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce‘s Tuesday announcement of its “Big 5” ideas for improving Kansas City, a quartet of the Chamber’s top dogs sat down to discuss that quintet of ideas with Nick Haines for Friday’s episode of Kansas City Week In Review (starting at 19:55).
Joining Haines were: Jim Heeter, Chamber president and CEO; Greg Graves, outgoing Chamber chairman and chairman/CEO of Burns & McDonnell; Frank Ellis, incoming chamber chairman and chairman/CEO of Swope Community Enterprises; and Kristi Wyatt, the Chamber’s senior vice president of government relations and policy development.
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During the course of the show, the group discsuses all of the “Big 5.” To review, the five ideas are:
- The Making of America’s Most Entrepreneurial City
- The World’s Symposium on Animal Health
- The Kansas City Regional Translational Research Institute
- The New UMKC Downtown Conservatory
- The Urban Core Neighborhood Initiative
For Silicon Prairie News readers, the most pertinent of those points is the making of America’s most entrepreneurial city, which the group delves into at the 19:55 mark (the video above starts at that point). It’s a short discussion but sheds some additional light on the Chamber’s plan to build on Kansas City’s entrepreneurial history and leverage its existing resources to make the area more of a household name in entrepreneurship.
“We have these unique assets,” Heeter says. “There are a lot of cities in America that would like to be the most entrepreneurial city. The reason Kansas City will be the most entrepreneurial city is not just because of our legacy and history, it’s because of assets like the Bloch School of Management and the Kauffman Foundation, the world leader in entrepreneurial study, and Google — let’s not forget Google. So we have the assets to leverage.”
When Haines presses the group on the specifics of how it will achieve its ambitious entrepreneurial aims, Graves touches on the important role to be played by Peter daSilva, the president and COO of UMB and Chamber-designated “champion” of the entrepreneurial piece of the Big 5:
“You ask yourself the question, ‘OK, what’s our five things that we need to do beyond (designating daSilva and leveraging existing resources) to make it the greatest entrepreneurial city?’” Graves says.
“Peter is going to have to lead a group … on its own quest.”
