Instructors

Sharon C. Ballard is president and CEO of EnableVentures, Inc., and former chief executive and founder of Reticular Systems, Inc. Under her leadership, Reticular won more than thirty SBIR Program awards. The company spun out new ventures that were quickly purchased. Reticular's core products are still selling globally. She held management posts in Titan Corporation, Motorola Inc., and LINKABIT Corporation. As the first UCSD CONNECT management fellow, she coached more than sixty early-stage high tech entrepreneurs. She developed the Supercoach™ system and toolset.

Ballard has coached entrepreneurs in Europe and across the US. She is a founding management fellow for Arizona State University's Technopolis Program, focusing on educating, coaching, and networking early-stage entrepreneurs. Ballard has provided key entrepreneurial training for volunteer coaches at the University of Kentucky's Entrepreneurial Coaches Institute. Ballard has coached early stage entrepreneurs to successfully raise venture capital and has worked with many company founders to develop winning SBIR and boot strapping strategies, thereby preserving greater ownership for the company founders.

Mack Davis is a partner and founding member of the VentureQuest team. Davis has been an active entrepreneur, educator, and author for more than forty years. His businesses include a high-tech venture, a menswear retailing chain, an entrepreneur consulting firm, an import/export fly fishing company, and a not-for-profit entrepreneurial education foundation.

Davis was an adjunct professor of entrepreneurs at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business and the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Creativity at Metropolitan State College of Denver. Davis has coauthored seven books on entrepreneurship and technology commercialization and is professor emeritus of the Entrepreneurship Program at the University of Southern California. Davis co-directed the Entrepreneurial Education Foundation funded by Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The foundation has trained more than 100,000 entrepreneurs in writing feasibility and business plans in forty US states, Australia, Canada, and Sweden.

Courtney Price,an entrepreneur for the past thirty years, founded VentureQuest, utilizing her background and experience to lead and direct high-growth organizations toward new and higher revenue streams. She helps them capitalize on developing people, market opportunities, and commercializing technology. The firm works with high-growth companies, health care providers, federal laboratories, and universities worldwide to better commercialize and extract value from their innovation to produce bottom line impact.

Price founded the Entrepreneurial Education Foundation in Kansas City and co-founded FastTrac™. Her programs have been utilized by more than 200,000 professional in business environments worldwide. Price was the first scholar-in-residence at The Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership in Kansas City. Price's weekly column, "Entrepreneurs Ask," appeared in more than 350 newspapers nationwide. She has written more than ten books on entrepreneurship, serves on several boards, and is a visiting professor at colleges and universities around the globe.