Discussion in international relations often centres on a wide variety of norms, such as sustainable development, global governance, human security, and the responsibility to protect. A significant amount of work focuses on not only the theoretical and policy development of these norms but also the role of various norm entrepreneurs in promoting norm emergence and diffusion. Yet there are still knowledge gaps regarding the norm entrepreneurship role of international commissions that engage in the early stage of the emergence of these norms and their processes. This article elucidates the process of creation of normative ideas by analysing the role of international commissions as norm entrepreneurs, utilising a case study of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which proposed the normative idea of the responsibility to protect (R2P) in 2001. The theoretical contribution of this article is to expand the understanding of norm entrepreneurship by adding international commissions to the universe of norm entrepreneurs and illuminating their strategies for constructing normative ideas. Empirically, it explores the role and activities of the ICISS in creating the normative idea of R2P, which contrasts the existing literature that has only focused on the development of R2P after the Commission has finished its work.