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Isabella Bank Institute for Entrepreneurship

We are a dedicated institute for student entrepreneurs across campus and beyond. We aim to maximize your success by fostering your entrepreneurial mindset, promote inter-disciplinary collaboration and provide support for the creation and development of your new ventures. Jumpstart your ideas and get involved today!

Tune in for excitement!

Passion. Potential. Pitches. Don't miss any of the 2025 New Venture Challenge excitement.

Tune in Friday, April 11 at 1 p.m. for great ideas and fierce competition. Then, join the judges, mentors, spectators and teams as they see who is going home with thousands of dollars in venture financing. The awards broadcast begins at 6:30 p.m. and one team will walk away as the overall best venture. 

Start your entrepreneurial journey

Central Michigan University’s College of Business Administration is the home of the Isabella Bank Institute for Entrepreneurship and the first Department of Entrepreneurship in the state of Michigan. We are a student-centric hub where experiential, curricular, and external entrepreneurial opportunities intersect.

Our mission is to maximize student success by fostering a campus-wide entrepreneurial mindset that promotes inter-disciplinary collaboration and the creation of new ventures.

We aim to create innovative programming, boost cross-campus and ecosystem collaboration and provide a comprehensive mentoring program.

Our institute provides extracurricular opportunities and is open to all undergraduate and graduate CMU students.

Student opportunities

  • Meet experienced alumni, faculty, entrepreneurs, investors, and other business and political leaders.
  • Learn practical skills, innovative thinking, and connect with mentors and entrepreneurial resources.
  • Attend skill-building workshops and compete in pitch competitions and Hackathons.
  • Take part in special scholarship programs and travel experiences.
  • Pitch your venture at our signature New Venture Challenge event and compete for up to $20,000 in cash awards.

      Find your path

      Are you interested in becoming an entrepreneur?

      Every journey is unique. Explore the opportunities that interest you.

      Professor studies how school food impacts attendance

      by Henry Heller

      Sharon Kukla Acevedo, Ph.D., a professor of Public Administration and director of the Master of Public Administration program, compared the costs and benefits of four programs designed to improve student’s attendance. In the US, one in six public school students are chronically absent (have missed 15+ days of school in the past year). Poor attendance can lead to students being retained in a grade, dropping out of school, substance abuse and future unemployment.  

      In her research, Kukla Acevedo set out to discover if providing more nutritious food could be as effective as attendance-improving programs. Kukla Acevedo says, “Improving the quality of students’ food at school is just as effective at improving attendance rates and is a cheaper option than some of the programs designed to reduce absences. Choosing to provide more nutritious food [also] improves children’s behaviors, physical, and mental health. [Additionally], these behaviors last into adulthood.” 

      To conduct her research, Kukla Acevedo used published costs and benefits of a low-cost, medium-cost and high-cost absence-reduction programs and compared these findings to her own research on costs and benefits of nutritious food and attendance. 

      Kukla Acevedo says, “We thought that the nutritious food option would be prohibitively expensive because that is so often the focus of the national conversation about food. So, we were surprised that our cost analysis showed that nutritious food option was so cheap and effective at improving attendance. The hope is that superintendents, school nutrition directors, and education officials use these findings to make school-based decisions.” 

      This story is brought to you by the  Office of Research and Graduate Studies.

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