Dan Davison has experienced start-ups form many angles. He was actively engaged with several Boeing Ventures start-ups defining and testing their value propositions and working hands-on with teams to gain their first sales.

Previously Dan was a founder of the McDonnell Douglas Prospector Team, which had the mission to generate significant new business opportunities by leveraging existing know-how. That effort leveraged existing capabilities and intellectual property and resulted in the $700 M aircraft support business.

Building on the experience of building a business on intellectual property, Mr. Davison went on as a founder of a corporate technology out-licensing program at McDonnell Douglas where through partners or corporate spin-outs, he created additional value for the corporation from sunk technology investments. Mr. Davison achieved the group’s first new licensing deals, including with Boeing-employee start-ups. That effort eventually grew to produce millions in revenue for McDonnell Douglas, and served as best-practice model for Boeing when it adopted technology licensing after the acquisition of McDonnell Douglas in 1997.

Dan left Boeing in 1998 to define and sell software addressing the corporate niche for enterprise-level intellectual asset management. As an early employee of Aurigin Systems, Dan was responsible for developing and vetting Aurigin’s value proposition by working on-site with customers, and developing marketing requirements to drive product development. Clients included Monsanto, Eastman Chemical, Pfizer, Dow Chemical and others.

Before Aurigin was sold, Mr Davison left in 1999 with a contract to provide Aurigin’s marketing communications. On that base he founded BentonsEdge , which served technology companies. Over time BentonsEdge morphed to focus on the essential starting point for most start-ups, the value proposition and getting early sales. The BentonsEdge process has been codified into the Value-Story Selling^TM methodology, which documents the client’s story visually, tests the proposition with customers, and jump-starts a client’s sales process by achieving early sales.

Mr. Davison is a frequent lecturer on sales, marketing and getting buy-in in organizations at Washington University and Saint Louis University, seminar series, trade and corporate meetings. Through BentonsEdge his clients include large organizations including Boeing, Lockheed and Sara Lee, and growing companies including former Boeing Ventures projects like the chemical management firm Avchem. Mr. Davison holds an MBA from Saint Louis University and a BA in quantitative methods from the University of Connecticut.