An entrepreneur will share his experiences during a Sigma Series lecture at the Virginia Air and Space Center in Hampton, Virginia, at 7:30 p.m. on May 2. The talk is free and open to the public.
Meanwhile, the founder of the Maker Faire movement will speak at 2 p.m. May 4 at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton and at the Virginia Air and Space Center at 7:30 p.m. The NASA talk is open to employees and news media, but not the public, while the Virginia Air and Space Center event is free and open to the public.
NASA Langley will be featured at the Hampton Roads Mini-Maker Faire on Saturday, May 6, at the Hampton Roads Convention Center in Hampton. For more information go to http://hamptonroads.makerfaire.com/
For access to the NASA Langley lecture, news media should contact Michael Finneran at michael.p.finneran@nasa.gov Entrepreneurship
Daniel Morris will speak at the May 2 lecture at the Virginia Air and Space Center, sharing traits that successful entrepreneurs inherently possess or learn to cultivate.
Morris is acting executive director at the National Institute of Aerospace’s Peninsula Technology Incubator, which focuses on high-tech, high-potential growth businesses in the unmanned systems (UMS) field. He also is president of the Hampton Roads Chapter of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
He is the founder and co-chair of the Hampton Roads Unmanned Systems Alliance (HRUSA), a newly formed organization comprised of members from the UMS business community, legislators, regulators, and regional economic leaders. The purpose of HRUSA is to align and coordinate the region’s unmanned systems industry efforts with the Commonwealth of Virginia’s UMS Center of Excellence and with recommendations from the Governor’s Virginia Unmanned Systems Commission Report.
Morris founded reQuire, a technology-based service to track the release of real estate mortgage liens. The service is still used nationwide in the residential real estate transaction market.
After selling reQuire, he pursued opportunities in the unmanned systems industry. He is an investor and advisor in several UMS businesses. He also established Innovation, Technology and Business Solutions, a consulting and business development company stimulating opportunities in the commercialization of UMS. Morris also is licensed to practice Law in Virginia.
Maker Faire
Dale Dougherty will speak at both the Langley colloquium and the Sigma Series on May 4. He is the founder of MAKE: Magazine, and the Maker Faire, held first in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. By 2016, there were nearly 200 Maker Faires in 40 countries.
Makers often start a project to pursue a personal interest or challenge. Increasingly, realize they can have positive impact by exploring the unknown, creating new products, or solving problems. The movement is inspiring people to organize or join missions that contribute new ideas and innovations.
Dougherty is also CEO of Maker Media Inc. in San Francisco. In 2011, he was honored at the White House as a “Champion of Change” through an initiative that honors Americans who are “doing extraordinary things in their communities to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.”
At the 2014 White House Maker Faire, he was introduced by then-President Barack Obama as an innovator making significant contributions to education and business.
Dougherty is author of “Free to Make: How the Maker Movement Is Changing our Jobs, Schools and Minds” with Adriane Conrad. He is a co-author of “Maker City: A Practical Guide for Reinventing American Cities” with Peter Hirshberg and Marcia Kadano.
