It’s something Morris knows a lot about -- from all angles.

“I’m an entrepreneur at heart,” he said during an interview at The Oak Ridger’s offices.

He grew up throughout East Tennessee and part of Alabama, living the longest time in Dayton, Tenn.

“I left Rhea County High School thinking I wanted to be a high school band director,” Morris said. But life had other plans. He studied computer science and later worked at the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he worked along with the Work for Others program.

“But since 1991, it’s been all small business for me,” Morris said. One of those five businesses he was involved in, NetLearning, was the first client company in the Center for Entrepreneurial Growth.

Since 2008 he’s worked as director of Tech 20/20’s Center for Entrepreneurial Growth, while over the years he’s been on the Tennessee Valley Tech Council and Tech 20/20’s board.

Venture development is the “development of small businesses that have the potential to grow significantly,” Morris defined. It might be a small business that is taking advantage of technology transfers from ORNL or another opportunity that has significant growth potential.

At the Tech 20/20 offices in Commerce Park, there’s a wall where Tech 20/20 employees and officials identify the creation and movement of a venture development from the beginning steps from innovation or technology to uniting it with a company or forming a new company, to creating a business model, to getting the capital, and eventually coming up with how to sell it to a lot of people.

Venture development isn’t affected negatively by the economy. If anything, Morris indicated, a failing economy can spur venture development.

Historically, he said, entrepreneurship is not affected by a downturn. A person who is layed off might decide to take the leap and pursue a dream or look for opportunities he or she might not have pursued while safely employed.

“The opportunity to innovate is always there,” Morris said.

People have to be willing to take the risk, to make it happen, he said.

“The thing we need is people,” Morris said. Capital will come if you have the synergy of the right idea and the right people, he said.

Morris said in the near future Tech 20/20 is going to launch a “pitch” contest with the award being money to start a small business.

Stressing venture development isn’t new to Tech 20/20, Morris said he sees what he and Tech 20/20 are doing now as “an alignment activity.” Incubation, coaching and mentoring, networking and risk capital are the four components of venture development in the region, he said, and they’ll be working to “intersect the circles” of these four components this year.