Motor City Multipliers
The University of Michigan’s Detroit Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Project (DNEP) helps Detroit local businesses grow while providing U-M students with life-changing consulting experiences.
Through long-term relationships and effective sequencing, DNEP connects entrepreneurs with faculty-supervised student teams, who are enrolled in action-based learning courses at the University, to address entrepreneurs’ legal, financial, marketing, operational, design, and technology challenges.
Students gain valuable professional experience working with real businesses and come to know and love Detroit; business owners gain access to data and capacity that allows them to scale.
Want to Become a Client for a U-M Student Team?
2025-2026 Catalog of DNEP Classes & Programs
View our catalog to see what we’re recruiting for now. If we can’t place you, we will try to refer you to someone else who can help.
Ready to apply? Complete a Client Intake Form.
What Students Learn to Do in DNEP Classes (Faculty Videos)
How We Are Able to Offer No-Cost Professional Services at Scale
As a university-based Business Support Organization (BSO), DNEP is the first in the country to offer wrap-around services to businesses that include legal, business, and design support. Our business model is simple:
- DNEP recruits small businesses for U-M faculty who teach action-based learning classes;
- Students enroll in the classes, where they are trained and supervised by faculty; and
- After a client finishes working with a team of students, they come back to DNEP when they are ready for placement with another U-M class or a referral to one of our Detroit partners.
Collectively, DNEP deploys 500 students as professionals-in-training per year to work with 250+ Detroit businesses per year. 90% of the businesses we support are minority-owned. Our target neighborhoods include the East Jefferson corridor, Southwest Detroit, Livernois/Six Mile, and Grandmont Rosedale.
Student voices
Claire Smith
Stamps School of Art & Design
DNEP gave me the unique opportunity to collaborate with business and law students while taking a design class. We were all working on different aspects of our client’s business, but still found places where we could share research findings and inform each other’s work. It was really insightful to see how other students approached the task in their own ways and so rewarding at the end to present a variety of resources as a team.
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