Purpose: How university context (UC) enhances students’ entrepreneurial intentions and opportunity recognition is an emerging topic. It is known that students learn, not only from educational programmes, but also from the context in which they are embedded. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of such context on student’s entrepreneurial intentions and opportunity recognition.Design/methodology/approach: The authors use a three-dimensional institutional framework to describe UC including regulative, normative and cognitive structures. Regulative structures refer to rules and regulations, support initiatives in relation to entrepreneurship; normative structures include shared values and norms; while cognitive structures apply to knowledge among students and faculty. A heterogeneous sample of 196 respondents from five countries was used to create reliable measures of UC and to test the hypotheses with the help of regression analysis.Findings: The findings indicate that two dimensions of UC in particular (regulative and normative) were shown to be of great importance in increasing entrepreneurial intentions and opportunity recognition among students.Originality/value: The study contributes to this further by suggesting a reliable and theory-grounded scale of UC. Furthermore, this study adds to the discussion on entrepreneurship education by proving evidence of the importance of UC on entrepreneurial intentions. The important contribution is acknowledgement of the fact that social systems both constrain and enable entrepreneurs in their discovery, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities. The authors have established that “would-be student entrepreneurs” do not exist separately from their structural context. Attempts to understand them outside of this context cannot, therefore, fully capture their nature.

How are innovations taken to market? Both theoretically and empirically, the process of commercialization has received scant attention. This study investigates the early commercialization process of three innovative firms in the Norwegian petroleum industry. The authors argue that the role of strategic choice is important for the processes these firms use to create and build their own dynamic capabilities. In this regard, they address the central question of what role the strategic choice of the firm plays in the process, creation and evolution of its dynamic capabilities during the early stage of commercialization. The authors' findings reveal that certain dynamic capabilities are emphasized and appear to be more relevant to the strategic intentions of the CEO or entrepreneurial team. Two firms, whose strategic intent was to commercialize and exit, were more inclined to build an adaptive capability, while the firm intending to commercialize and to stay in the market stressed the importance of absorptive capability. Common to all three cases is the finding that adaptive and absorptive capabilities seem to enhance their innovative capabilities, which are essential for commercializing innovations.

This study introduces and validates a measure of a company’s institutional profile for sustainability. It uses institutional theory as a lens to understand the factors that legitimize the adoption of renewable energy activities in an oil and gas company. The three institutional dimensions used in this study are regulative, normative and cognitive, which aimed to measure legitimacy in an oil and gas company under a sustainable change. Survey-based research was carried out among employees to test this theory. Moreover, structural equation modeling was used to test the model fit, validate the measures, and test the four hypotheses. The results showed that regulative and normative pillars play the main role in legitimating renewable energy practices in our case company. The findings provide researchers and companies with a valuable resource for exploring legitimacy in order to understand what makes companies legitimize new sustainable activities that are outside the companies’ core business.