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The purpose of this study is, from the perspective of artisan entrepreneurship (AE), to understand how professional and higher education institutions, local authorities, local and cross-border cultural entities and tourism stakeholders perceive AE by collaborating in a network to develop innovative and sustainable strategies, using the Quintuple Helix innovation model.

Using a qualitative approach, 34 semi-structured interviews were carried out with organisations by emailing them a Google Form. The organisations interviewed were from the north-east of Portugal (Bragança, Miranda do Douro, Mogadouro, Vimioso and Vinhais) and the north of Spain (Zamora Province). The data collected was subjected to content and lexical analysis using the computerised lexical analysis software IRaMuTeQ.

AE is seen as the representation of a culture where traditional crafts are the identity of a region. The practical and political implications for decision makers in the Quintuple Helix can be seen in the definition of strategies and proposals that should leverage and define regional and cross-border policies, leveraging the need for networking to define concrete measures and programmes for support and training in entrepreneurship and AE, as well as the creation and/or standardisation of existing support networks.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first study to address and deal with the issue of AE by understanding how professional and higher education institutions, local authorities, local and cross-border cultural entities perceive AE and collaborate in a network to develop innovative and sustainable strategies, through the paradigm of the Quintuple Helix model. It also combines a content analysis and a lexical analysis using computerised lexical analysis software – IRaMuTeQ.

Discovering opportunities is a key entrepreneurship competence for those who want to start their own business and who choose to enter the workforce. In this study, the authors focus on the antecedents of the ability to discover entrepreneurial opportunities by uncovering how and when students' personal initiative (Frese and Fay, 2001) leads to an increase in this key competency. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of risk-taking and creativity in the interplay between personal initiative and opportunity discovery competencies among university students.

Data were collected with a self-assessment tool in two moments in time, using a sample of 103 university students from Portugal enrolled in an entrepreneurship course. The authors measured personal initiative and entrepreneurial risk-taking at the beginning of the entrepreneurship course (Time 1). Two months later (Time 2), by the end of an entrepreneurship course, the authors measured creativity and opportunity discovery abilities.

The results of this study showed that risk-taking mediates the effect of personal initiative on opportunity discovery and that creativity interacts with risk-taking and opportunity discovery. Specifically, the authors found that the relationship between entrepreneurial risk-taking and opportunity discovery is positive and statistically significant when students display average or above-average creativity. The indirect effect of the personal initiative on opportunity discovery through entrepreneurial risk-taking seems to increase when the student's creativity increases, as the index of moderated mediation is positive.

As with all studies, there are limitations to work of this study. First, data of this study is restricted to a sample of students from Portugal. As such, the authors should be careful about generalizations concerning students from other cultural settings; entrepreneurship competencies can differ across countries. Second, the findings of the present study are based on students’ self-reports regarding their own entrepreneurship competencies.

This work can inspire entrepreneurship educators to look at the entrepreneurship competencies models holistically and inspire future work to explore the relationship patterns between entrepreneurial competencies.