Gift provides scholarships for entrepreneurial students

The University of Michigan recently announced a new scholarship to benefit students on an entrepreneurial path, made possible through a significant gift by John and Cynthia Luce of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

The donation will create the Luce Family Scholarship Fund to provide endowed scholarships to select students enrolled in the campuswide minor in entrepreneurship. The fund specifically supports students pursuing entrepreneurship education to study and apply creative and innovative thinking.

The scholarship, managed by the provost’s Innovate Blue initiative, will be awarded to five students during the 2016-2017 academic year, with plans to increase the number in future years.

The Luce family donation supports an entrepreneurial education for students from diverse areas of study and aims to provide them with a toolkit to continually learn, innovate and adapt long after graduation. A successful entrepreneur in his own right, John Luce credits an early entrepreneurial spark for helping him to grow his Michigan-based business.

Both John and Cynthia Luce are graduates of the University of Michigan. “The Luce family scholarship fund gives us the platform to hopefully give back to the institution which has provided us so much. Awakening the entrepreneurial spirit inside some of the most gifted students in the world seems like a natural extension of what the University of Michigan stands for,” said John Luce.

“John and Cindy are important supporters of U-M’s entrepreneurial ecosystem through Innovate Blue, and this gift will give more students an opportunity to pursue an entrepreneurial education that will, ultimately, help them shape and create value in their life,” said Innovate Blue Director Oscar Ybarra.