Leonard Gingerella, a technology business entrepreneur and marketing executive for Fortune 500 companies, has joined DePaul University’s Coleman Entrepreneurship Center as an entrepreneur-in-residence and the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business as an executive-in-residence. In his new roles, Gingerella will raise awareness about the center’s services for entrepreneurs and teach management courses in DePaul’s highly ranked MBA program.

Gingerella’s background encompasses 35 years of executive-level marketing and sales experience for major corporations as well as leadership roles in successful technology start-ups in Austin, Texas, and other cities. His entrepreneurial experience includes founding and growing a multi-million dollar management-consulting firm, United Training Services, which he subsequently sold to a New York Stock Exchange-listed company.

Gingerella was vice president of sales and marketing for two early-stage ventures— E-Cognita Technologies, a Java-based software provider for the commercial mortgage lending market, and Enterprise Inc., a software provider for business-to-business Web marketing. He has been an executive consultant for leading global organizations, including Applied Materials, IBM, MBNA, Ford Motor Co., General Motors, SBC and Samsung. Gingerella earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business administration from Central Michigan University and he has authored numerous articles about entrepreneurship.

“Len brings a wealth of practical entrepreneurship experience to DePaul, which will benefit the clients who receive assistance from our center, as well as the students we teach and mentor,” said Raman Chadha, executive director of the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center.

The Coleman Entrepreneurship Center was established at DePaul in 2003 through a Coleman Foundation matching grant of $2.5 million. Building on DePaul’s well-respected academic programs in entrepreneurship, the center offers services to help develop and grow businesses. Since it opened in September of 2003, the center has assisted more than 150 entrepreneur clients through professional and student-based consulting services.

Center programs include a seminar series called Angel Academy, which works to increase private investment for Chicago entrepreneurs; the DePaul New Venture Challenge, a business plan competition to stimulate entrepreneurial activity in the Chicago area; and the Entrepreneurial Quest Seminar Series, a group of seminars and workshops for entrepreneurs whose businesses are at the same stage of development.

Gingerella plans to meet with representatives from area chambers of commerce, city agencies and other organizations that assist entrepreneurs to make them aware of the center’s services. “The Coleman Entrepreneurship Center offers a unique resource for the entrepreneur,” he said. “We want to reach out to this community to make them more aware of the relevant, practical solutions they can find through our services, which are guided by the center’s experienced entrepreneurs. We also offer market research capabilities utilizing DePaul’s MBA students.”

Gingerella will serve as a business liaison and mentor for the center’s student consultants program, which has assisted more than 250 Chicago-area businesses and organizations since its inception. The program links business owners to teams of students who spend 10 weeks researching marketing or business planning issues, giving business owners vital information for making decisions while providing students with valuable hands-on experience. Examples of past student consulting projects include researching market data to assist a restaurant owner in choosing the best location to open a second eatery and helping a recycled inkjet cartridge franchise identify its customer base in Chicago.

Gingerella also will teach courses in technology ventures and entrepreneurship in the business school’s entrepreneur degree program, which was ranked among the 13 best in the nation in Entrepreneur magazine’s annual evaluation of the “Top 100 Entrepreneurial Colleges.”