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Through a cross-culture study, the purpose of this paper is to understand about how entrepreneurial universities can foster entrepreneurship in women by attending to psychological and environmental factors and personality traits that encourage women to form entrepreneurial intent.

The authors test the proposed conceptual model on a cross-cultural sample comprising 350 students from Italy, a developed country, and from Albania, an emerging country. Structural equation modeling is used to validate the proposed model and test the hypothesized relationships.

In both Italy and Albania, entrepreneurial universities significantly impact entrepreneurial attitudes and intentions in women. The major differences relate to psychological factors that predict self-employment attitudes and intentions. Specifically, risk-taking propensity and locus of control are important antecedents of attitudes in both samples; the need for independence is a significant predictor only in the Italian sample; need for achievement has significant influence only in the Albanian sample.

To better understand and interpret the phenomenon of female entrepreneurship, the authors use the theory of planned behavior to investigate entrepreneurial universities located in Italy, a developed country, and Albania, an emerging country.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate behavioural and contextual factors affecting entrepreneurial universities’ ability to influence student entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial intention.

Structural equation modelling was used to assess both micro and macro factors impacting on students’ entrepreneurial attitude and intention on a sample of 272 students of the Master of Business Administration at the University of Florence (Italy).

The study contributes to the literature on entrepreneurial universities by assessing the main factors affecting students’ entrepreneurial behaviour. The results stressed how students’ entrepreneurial intent is mainly affected by their entrepreneurial attitude, which is in turn influenced by some of the personality traits analyzed, in particular risk-taking propensity and locus of control. It also emerged how students’ perception of the university environment significantly influences their entrepreneurial attitude and intent.

By investigating the micro and macro factors that mostly affect students’ entrepreneurial intention, the research suggests some implications for future researches into student entrepreneurship, in order to develop specific teaching programmes affecting students’ entrepreneurial experience, character and related skills.

The value of the research relates to integrating psychological factors, geographical elements, and the contextual role of universities within student entrepreneurship in a scarcely investigated location, i.e. the Region of Tuscany (Italy).