T HE
C YLINDER
N ARRATIVE
1.
A Little History
Our Entrepreneurial Spirit
When you think of Kansas and Western Missouri as a regional economic engine, it’s easy to identify multiple entrepreneurial successes—and the enduring economic lift they’ve created. The list is long and storied: the Hall family, the Dunns, the Kauffmans, the Helzbergs, the Blochs, the Kochs, and others. Their enterprises not only created thousands of jobs but also seeded an innovation culture that became part of our region’s economic DNA. Cerner’s story exemplifies this dynamic. Neal Patterson, Cliff Illig, and Paul Gorup didn’t just grow a company— they engineered a scalable system for healthcare IT innovation. Prior to its sale to Oracle, Cerner employed tens of thousands, with billions in revenue flowing back into the region. However, Cerner’s impact was more than economic—it was and remains today viral. Through its associates Cerner’s DNA continues to propagate, seeding new ventures, strengthening existing firms, serving as a catalyst for enterprise growth. Yet despite this entrepreneurial legacy, our region has not realized its full potential. Many of our economic development support systems operate in silos. Talent development, enterprise growth and retention, research commercialization, and multi-stage capital formation have lacked the systemic integration needed for consistent and elevated regional prosperity. That is the challenge EnterpriseKC was built to address: not through isolated programs, but by architecting a scalable, data-driven, modular solution—an operating system for economic development and regional prosperity.
2. A New Vision for Economic Development: Architecting a Regional Operating System
As a 501(C)(3) business-led “think and do” tank EnterpriseKC was born from two interwoven insights. The first was the recognition that the common denominator for accelerated regional economic growth was the presence of enterprises – firms that derive 70% or more of their revenue from outside the region, thereby “importing” those dollars back to the region. These imported dollars function like high-bandwidth data packets that flow into the system, fueling economic lift across clusters, communities, and supply chains. The higher the concentration of enterprises, the greater the economic lift and the greater the regional prosperity.
The second recognition was that economic development, like computing, requires a system architecture—an integrated structure that orchestrates resources, optimizes processes, and enables scalable, repeatable results. What the Kansas and Western Missouri region lacked was not talent, ideas, or institutions—but a systematic, scalable, and measurable approach to align them. That systematic approach is what EnterpriseKC calls its Operating System for Economic Development , with EKC’s Cylinder Model at its core. The Cylinder Model serves as the operating system’s kernel—the core engine that executes strategic functions across all industry clusters.
The Cylinder Model leverages Cerner’s proven vision-to-value (V 2 ) formula which acts as our programming logic, where V ISION + M ISSION + S TRATEGY + P EOPLE + S TRUCTURE + P ROCESS + T OOL s = A CTIONS that lead to RESULTS. As the operating system kernel the Cylinder Model defines eight (8) strategic “Pillars” — each focused on a specific aspect of what is necessary for accelerated enterprise growth and regional prosperity. The Pillars are activated through internal and external “applications” that serve as user-facing tools to implement and scale measurable, results-oriented actions. Enterprise growth within any given industry cluster is dramatically accelerated by leveraging the various business-defined applications within the operating system. This structure ensures every part of the system works together, like threads in a high-performance computer processor, toward a single outcome: regional prosperity for all.
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