Mission

The Center for Innovation, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship (ICE Center)is an innovative driver of scholastic, educational, and professional development opportunities in the related areas of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship within the Villanova community. ICE Center initiatives provide value to a number of key stakeholders: To students, by offering courses and programs that enable them to further differentiate themselves as entrepreneurial thinkers; to faculty, by providing resources to support research in ICE-related topics; to the Villanova community by seeking ways to foster cross-college learning to embed entrepreneurial thinking more deeply in the culture.

Vision

The ICE Center will be widely recognized for its innovative approaches to enabling Villanova students to develop creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial thinking and problem-solving skills individually, infusing these skills more deeply in the Villanova community, and fostering world-class scholarly research that advances understanding of the value of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship in new and existing organizations.

The ICE Center within the Villanova University Community

At its core, the ICE Center’s mission is consistent with and supports the Villanova University’s strategic goal of advancing the “Augustinian Vision.” In particular, Augustinian principles engendering a passion for discovery and creative problem solving are at the root of the ICE Center’s mission.

In addition, many of the ICE Center’s initiatives directly advance the University’s strategic goal of focusing on integrated learning and the development of a community of learning that crosses college boundaries. A main principle of the center is the belief that students from Arts and Sciences, Engineering, Nursing, Business, and Law can all learn from one another how to become more well-rounded innovative and creative thinkers. The ICE Center fosters opportunities for this cross-disciplinary learning to occur.

Finally, while the ICE Center seeks to provide support for our many student-entrepreneurs across campus, in no way does this mean the Center is interested only in new businesses. Rather, we see entrepreneurship as something that is necessary for the success of new and existing organizations of all kinds. From the perspective of our University’s mission, this includes the many organizations on-campus and elsewhere that focus on increasing the common good for society. Creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurial thinking are a necessity for these organizations to survive. Organizations focused on worldwide issues such as hunger, poverty, and health have been most successful when employing innovative approaches to address these social problems, based largely on a solid foundation of economic feasibility and sustainability. Thus, there is great potential for the ICE Center to support our University’s strategic goals and positively impact our students, community, and world.