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.

2025 NVC Competition Live Stream

2025 NVC Awards Live Stream

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.

A student standing with a faculty member holding big winning checks from the New Venture Challenge 2024.

Start up

Build up your venture idea.

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A student smiling and standing in front of his venture display at the 2024 New Venture Challenge.

Family business

Explore the Alternative Entrepreneurial Pathways category at NVC.

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A close-up of the Prusa i3 MK3 printer in the entrepreneurship makerspace, the IDEA Den in Grawn Hall 166.

Product and prototype design

Create and patent your ideas.

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Innovation

Explore your ideas and build your skills.

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The weave of trauma and time

by Sarah Buckley

A girl who eats a Michigan city. An ordinary man who wrestles with being a werewolf once a month. Sometimes funny, sometimes absurd, and always engaging, one just never knows where a story or novel by Central Michigan University Professor of English Darrin Doyle will lead them.

Let Gravity Seize the Dead, Doyle’s forthcoming book, is yet another departure for the author, as his first novella. It will be published by Regal House Publishing, releasing on July 9.

“I’ve always been a fan of the novella form, books like Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, and Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. I’m thrilled to offer my own work in this form,” Doyle said.

Focused on a family who moves into a cabin in a Michigan forest, this Gothic novella shows two separate timelines (1907 and 2007) and investigates the lingering pain of trauma, and how it becomes woven into families. The two timelines “braid and bleed together,” Doyle said, “suggesting that time itself is an illusory concept.”

“It’s a sort of ghost story about a family haunted by past tragedy,” he continued, “suggesting the idea of intergenerational trauma – how our traumas are never lost but instead become part of the fabric of our selves, in the same way the natural world folds past and present into an eternal cycle of life and death.”

Regal House Publishing, an independent press located in Raleigh, North Carolina won the 2021 Independent Publisher of the Year Award from Forward Reviews.

“Each year they put out a wide variety of compelling contemporary fiction,” said Doyle. “It’s very cool to be a part of it.”

Let Gravity Seize the Dead is available for pre-order at Amazon and also at Regal House Publishing. Stay tuned for a local launch at Sleepy Dog Bookstore this summer, and on campus in the fall.