Meet this year’s Women Who Mean Business honorees
Maria Meyers, executive director of the UMKC Innovation Center and founder-creator of KCSourceLink, has been named one of the 2017 class of Women Who Mean Business by the Kansas City Business Journal.
The publication’s program has recognized the top-ranking area businesswomen for the past 18 years. This year, the program was expanded beyond women working in the for-profit sector for the first time, and now also recognizes “top-ranking women at nonprofits that derive the majority of their revenue from business activities or services, or exist to support the business community through resources, funding or economic development.”
Meyers has been at UMKC since 2003. Among the highlights of her tenure have been the founding of Digital Sandbox KC and leading the technology transfer effort to commercialize the biometric identification technology developed by a research team led by Prof. Reza Derakhshani of the UMKC School of Computing and Engineering. That led to the creation of Kansas City-based startup EyeVerify, recently purchased by Chinese conglomerate Ant Financial for a reported $100 million.
In 2014, the UMKC Innovation Center was awarded one of only eight “ScaleUP! America” program contracts from the U.S. Small Business Administration. Designed to both promote growth and strengthen the entrepreneurial ecosystem, the ScaleUP! program will select two cohorts each year to learn and grow by developing connections within the Kansas City region.
Karen Cox, COO at Children’s Mercy and a UMKC Trustee, was also honored as part of this year’s class of 25 women leaders. The Business Journal plans to publish full profiles of this year’s honorees in print and online on Aug. 25.