Universities as strategic knowledge creators. Some preliminary evidence

we propose a quantitative approach to university strategy based on internationally comparable microdata. Comparability issues are discussed at length in Bonaccorsi, Daraio and Lepori (Chapter 12). This chapter offers a preliminary sample of potential outcomes that can be derived from the available Aquameth dataset on six European countries: Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the UK.While the presented evidence still requires lot of refinements and qualitative comment, it provides a few quantitative elements able to support public policy debates. we try to build up an operationalization of the notion of university strategy capitalizing on the available data.We are able to track the position and evolution of universities with respect to some structural elements: ● research orientation, as measured by the share of PhD recipients over the total population of undergraduate students; ● research intensity, as measured by the average number of publications per unit of academic staff; ● offering profile, introducing a distinction between generalist and specialist universities; ● rate of growth in total number of undergraduate students; and ● degree of autonomy, as measured by the ratio between nongovernment funding sources and total funding. This is a preliminary effort to identify relevant dimensions and to capture emergent phenomena. We are very far from a complete characterization, but the results are encouraging. A detailed descriptive evidence is reported, while a tentative interpretation in the light of a theory of university strategy is proposed. The final section discusses some policy implications.