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Isabella Bank Institute for Entrepreneurship
We empower entrepreneurial thinkers—whether you’re launching a venture, building a family business, creating social impact, or driving innovation inside an organization. Turn ideas into action.
Start your entrepreneurial journey
At Central Michigan University, the Isabella Bank Institute for Entrepreneurship is more than a program—it’s where students from every major turn ideas into real impact. As Michigan’s first Department of Entrepreneurship, we’re a hub for hands-on learning, innovation, and mentorship.
Here, you’ll:
- Build an entrepreneurial mindset that sets you apart in any career path—launching ventures, shaping social missions, advancing family businesses, or driving innovation inside established companies.
- Collaborate across disciplines to create projects that matter.
- Learn from alumni, faculty, and industry leaders who’ve built their own paths.
- Gain real-world experience through workshops, hackathons, and pitch competitions.
- Compete in the New Venture Challenge, where students win up to $10,000 in cash and grants to grow their ideas.
Whether you want to start something new or transform what already exists, the Institute is your launchpad.
Take the next step!
When you’re ready to get started, stop by Grawn 164 to join the team or visit the Idea Den in Grawn 166—your space to brainstorm, build, and take the next step.
Questions?
Central Michigan University faculty members will use a federal grant to work with local communities developing plans to prepare for climate change-driven floods.
One of the first parts is using the powerful computing potential of the United States Department of Energy to build a new tool: precipitation models that could help local planners know how to protect critical pieces of their communities.
Wendy Robertson, Daria Kluver, John Allen and Rod Lammers, all from the College of Science and Engineering, received $1 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to work with community leaders in three Michigan watersheds.
Those watersheds are the Detroit-area Rouge River watershed, the Lower Grand River watershed near Grand Rapids and Isabella County’s Chippewa River watershed.
They also represent different kinds of land use, from urban Detroit to mostly rural Isabella County. That will create unique challenges depending on local priorities, offering CMU’s team a unique opportunity to collaborate with local leaders.
CMU’s researchers plan to solicit input to help identify vital community assets potentially at flood risk. Those assets could be anything from a field of high-value crops to roads necessary for First Responders, said Robertson, a hydrology expert with the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
At the same time, they’ll run models to determine what future precipitation patterns could look like for a range of carbon emissions scenarios, said Kluver, a climate scientist with the earth and atmospheric sciences department.
Lammers, an environmental engineer with the School of Engineering and Technology, plans to take those precipitation models and determine where the water will go.
They’ll use that data to craft scenarios for local leaders to help them make plans based on changing risks, Robertson said.
The county-level climate change models are unique in a couple of ways and could help solve an open question among scientists.
They are among the first regional climate models to include a realistic representation of how the Great Lakes influence Michigan’s weather patterns Robertson said.
Current models don’t go deeper than the state level. The new models can include real-world weather processes like wind patterns or lake-effect precipitation. It’s more in-depth information, but also more resource intensive.
The question is whether this kind of model will produce results accurate enough to justify the added expense.