Highland Heights, Ky. – Northern Kentucky University’s Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship (CIE) has received the “Exceptional Activities in Entrepreneurship Across Disciplines” award from the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers (GCEC).
The award recognizes programs that create, advance, and enable entrepreneurship education opportunities to multiple audiences across a college campus.
TheCIE’s INKUBATOR program has also been ranked among the top five university business accelerators in North America by UBI Global.
“We are pleased that the rest of the world is learning what our campus community already knows: entrepreneurs are welcome at NKU, and we are dedicated to helping them achieve their dreams,” said Dr. Rebecca I. Porterfield, dean of NKU’s Haile/US Bank College of Business.
Housed in NKU’s Haile/US Bank College of Business, the CIE serves students across campus through programs such as the INKUBATOR, which helps teams of students turn their business ideas into products and services; INKUBIZ, which connects entrepreneurial-minded students with mentors in the business community; and INKUREKA, a resource center for aspiring entrepreneurs of any major or minor.
The INKUBATOR was created in 2012 and has fostered dozens of student-led companies. The CIE, formerly the Entrepreneurship Institute, was formed in 2014 specifically to expand the scope of those activities across campus.
“NKU students dream big: we have law students who want to use technology to revolutionize how lawsuits are filed, informatics students who want to change how the world sees video games, and biology students with billion-dollar ideas,” said CIE Director Rodney D’Souza. “They are all welcome at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.”
The GCEC is the nation’s premier organization for university-based entrepreneurship centers. With membership from more than 200 universities across the globe, the organization links universities of all sizes to share best practices and to advance, strengthen, and celebrate university-based entrepreneurship centers and programs.
UBI Global provides support and benchmarking for more than 400 business incubator programs in 70 nations across the world. In 2014, it ranked NKU’s INKUBATOR among the top five university incubators in the world in the area of competence development.
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