Florida Southern, built on KANU, named 2025 Outstanding Emerging Entrepreneurship Center (GCEC)

The Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers (GCEC) has named the Center for Free Enterprise and Entrepreneurship (CFEE) at Florida Southern College its 2025 Outstanding Emerging Entrepreneurship Center. The GCEC awards are the field's annual recognition of the best of university entrepreneurship, and the Emerging Center category honors programs that have grown fast and grown well.

We're proud to say congratulations, and proud of what sits underneath the win.

The center's flagship Seed-to-Scale Program was also ranked the largest incubation program in the state of Florida in 2025. More than 400 students, 11 percent of Florida Southern's entire student body, participate. For comparison, most campus entrepreneurship programs reach a low single-digit percentage of students. Florida Southern built a program where entrepreneurship isn't a club for the already-committed; it's a path most students can actually walk.

That scale is the point. Executive Director Justin Heacock has said the center won because it is “reimagining entrepreneurial education at scale,” and his stated hope is that the award shows other schools that entrepreneurship can reach far more than one percent of a campus.

Here's the part we're proud to be part of: Seed-to-Scale runs on KANU. Justin and his team built the program's content, curriculum, and verification process themselves; the substance of the award is entirely their own work. KANU is the platform underneath it: the infrastructure that lets 400+ students launch real ventures, track real customers, and record real revenue at a scale most centers can't touch. It's the model KANU was built for: students who don't write hypothetical business plans, but develop ideas, test them with real customers, and launch revenue-producing ventures, with every outcome recorded as it happens.

Awards don't teach students. But when the field's own consortium looks at hundreds of entrepreneurship centers and singles out the one where 11 percent of the student body is building real businesses, it tells you which direction entrepreneurship education is moving.

We think it's moving toward real. Florida Southern got there early, and we're glad to be the platform they built it on.