The Arthur & Carlyse Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship
The Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship aims to promote a new kind of entrepreneur: a person capable of integrating personal virtue, cutting-edge entrepreneurial tools and long-term perspective to launch and grow enterprises that harness human creativity at the service of individuals and communities. The Ciocca Center brings together business professionals, academics and students to address current business issues and develop projects to grow companies, lift communities and allow individuals to flourish.

Purpose

The Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship was founded in 2015 to innovate, teach, mentor, exhort, and model the virtuous, entrepreneurial society. Our ideas are based on personalist economic theories, on lived experience, and on Catholic anthropology, which places the person at the center of business and economic life. The center seeks to be a catalyst for innovation in education at Catholic University and within Catholic education and business at large.

Our center is dedicated to helping intentional Catholics and like-minded collaborators create and grow person-centered companies, made up of individuals with strong character who produce sustainable value for the people and communities they serve. All while living their Christian principles to the highest degree — even to the point of holiness.

Vision:

We harness the power of principled entrepreneurship to overcome the small-spirited, zero-sum vision of business by inspiring the creation of profitable, person-centered companies.

Mission:

  • To reimagine entrepreneurship education.
  • To form and educate principled entrepreneurs who produce goods and services that truly serve.
  • To help people discover and embrace business as a noble vocation that leads to human flourishing.
  • To introduce students to the liberating fruits of free enterprise.
  • To offer students a pathway to create their own businesses.
  • To engage (potential) entrepreneurs in lifelong learning and offer a community for it.
  • To produce media content and teaching materials that support our vision.
  • To encourage students to critically engage intellectual traditions that see the marketplace as an order based on entrepreneurship and knowledge creation.
  • To promote principled entrepreneurship and an understanding of Catholic teaching with regards to business.

Pillars of Principled Entrepreneurship:

We believe that:

  1. The Economy Exists for People, Not People for the Economy
  2. Creative Work Is Uniquely Human
  3. Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast
  4. Principled Entrepreneurs Create Win/Win Solutions
  5. Always Think Like an Entrepreneur

Andreas Widmer

Founder and Director, The Arthur & Carlyse Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship

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Recognizing it will take alignment of all our organizations to scale impact globally, we invite you to join the movement as a Steward of Inclusive Capitalism. Together, the collective action of Council members will contribute to a fairer, more inclusive and sustainable future for all people and our planet.