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About Us

The Calvin Center for Innovation in Business (CCIB) engages students, faculty, and the broader business community to support and develop the Calvin University School of Business, raising the level of business education and scholarship at Calvin University to ensure students are well-equipped for lives of service and leadership in business.

Mission

Our mission is to better equip and support Calvin faculty and students to serve in their communities of practice, by fostering educational excellence, promoting experiential learning and engaging the broader business community.

Our programming focuses on:

Foster educational excellence

The CCIB works to attract, retain, encourage, and grow Calvin business faculty and students by providing ongoing support of scholarship and engagement through a variety of opportunities, including faculty and student grants, student research projects, conferences, discussion forums, book clubs, networking opportunities, and more.

Promote experiential learning

Experiential learning, by definition, is the process by which students develop knowledge, skills, and values through direct experiences. To that end, the CCIB works alongside Calvin faculty and staff to identify and execute project-based, experiential learning opportunities and internships for Calvin business students, which promote the highest level of learning among students.

Engage the broader business community

Through mutually beneficial relationships with local businesses and organizations, the CCIB is able to positively and significantly impact Calvin students by allowing them to integrate knowledge and skills learned in the classroom with tangible, hands-on experiences. The CCIB is responsible for identifying Calvin Action Projects (CAP), which engage students in project-based learning opportunities and allow them to act as consultants on real business problems. Additionally, the CCIB regularly sponsors and hosts business-related community events, including the Calvin Business Partners Awards, Executive Breakfasts, Leadercast, Live2Lead, the Calvin Faith in Business Author Series, and the Award for Scholarship on Christianity in Business.

People and Partners

The success of the CCIB rests on the strength of its community of active, committed stakeholders—including students, faculty, staff, advisory board members, CAP clients, and many other external partners.

We regularly work together to share knowledge, skills, and goals, to better prepare students for service within their communities. Each of these groups contribute uniquely to our mission, and our work is driven by their faith, expertise, wisdom, passion, and leadership.

Our Advisory Board assists in guiding the direction and programming of the CCIB. Members of this board are from various departments within Calvin University and are passionate about the mission set forth by the CCIB.

  • Tom Betts, Chair of the Business Department
  • Crystal Bruxvoort, Professor
  • Matt Halteman, Professor
  • Dirk Pruis, Professor
  • Marilyn Stansbury, MAcc Director, Associate Professor
  • David Wunder, Dean for Faculty Development

Investor Impact Reports

The CCIB—its staff, its faculty, its students, and all who are impacted by its work—express their sincere gratitude to the alumni, friends, foundations, and corporations that have generously supported the work of the center, as CAP sponsors, as donors, as advocates, and as friends.

The Calvin Center for Innovation in Business Investor Impact Reports outline the positive impact of private gifts, especially to our students, and shows the CCIB's progress over the past year.

The CCIB—its staff, its faculty, its students, and all who are impacted by its work—express their sincere gratitude to the alumni, friends, foundations, and corporations that have generously supported the work of the center, as CAP sponsors, as donors, as advocates, and as friends.

The Calvin Center for Innovation in Business Investor Impact Reports outline the positive impact of private gifts, especially to our students, and shows the CCIB's progress over the past year.

Our History

The faculty senate gave their approval on Monday, April 5, 2010 for the newest Calvin center to open for business—literally, in this case.

The Calvin Center for Innovation in Business is officially up and running; and the folks who are behind this startup are hoping that the center will raise the level of business education and scholarship at Calvin. “We want Calvin to be one of the top schools in the nation to study business,” said Calvin president Gaylen Byker, “and the center is a big part of that."

The importance of practice

"I always liken teaching business to teaching medicine,” said Calvin business professor Bob Eames, the first director of the Calvin Center for Innovation in Business. "It's a practice. It's something you do that demands application of your knowledge. I believe it's one of those things where if you're going to teach it, it really helps to have some experience doing it."

Because of that ethos, he continued, Calvin's business professors have typically been practitioners--PhD's, CPA's and MBA's who came to Calvin with a lot of experience in business but not much, if any, experience in scholarship. (Eames himself is an MBA with a background in industry at Steelcase and other companies.) Consequently, although business is one of Calvin's top majors, it was a major taught with a fairly large number of adjuncts. The department saw a lot of faculty turnover. Eames hopes the new center will attract faculty to the business department who are top scholars as well as top teachers. “We’ve got to up our game,” agreed business professor Leonard Van Drunen, who served on the task force that revised the business major and designed the new center.

Another way the center will improve the quality business of education at Calvin is to provide experiential learning (internships and project-based learning) for business students. In the seven years he’s taught at Calvin, Eames has partnered his students with companies such as Bissell, Meijer and Steelcase on real-world business problems. One student team, for example, is currently doing ethnographic research on how cleaning crews use their tools as a way to design better “stick products” (brooms and mops). As director of the center, Eames hopes to create more of these project-based learning opportunities and internships for Calvin’s business students.

Business concentrations

Key to all of these endeavors is engagement with broader communities of business. “What we really need is people in the business community aware of and supportive of our program,” Van Drunen said. The center’s creators agree that the Calvin’s newly revamped business major (and the existing accounting major) are two more good partners to the Center for Innovation and Excellence in Business. The new curriculum requires students to concentrate in one area of business study: marketing, operations, human resources, finance or small business. This specialization is important to prepare students for the job market, Van Drunen said. "There are no general business jobs,” he emphasized. “There are jobs in marketing, operations, human resources, finance or small business. We’re helping our students think that way.”

At the same time, the new business major helps students to anchor their business education in the broader liberal arts context. The business and related course requirements of the major have been scaled back from 52 to 46 credit hours, allowing students to take classes in other disciplines.

Well-rounded majors

"I believe that if a student does a good job mixing the business major and the liberal arts with hands-on experience and mentoring that they will do better in the long run than the graduate who spends four years on a university campus simply specializing in business,” Byker said. “At Calvin we will now be able to better provide those opportunities that we believe will equip our grads to make a difference in God's Kingdom for the long haul.”

Eames is eager to see the center functioning in support of that vision. And he’s grateful that the center, which officially launches in the fall, will not rely on university funding. “Donors were eager to dig deeper to fund this over and above their already generous support of the university,” he said. Meantime, Eames is ready to get to work: “The first thing I’ve got to do is find 20 new projects for our capstone class,” he said.

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