University strategic trajectories: developing economy vs economy in transition.

Modern universities are facing a variety of challenges from traditional issues of competition and budget cuts to calls for entrepreneurship and business support. A response to these challenges is to be addressed in the universities' strategies, which are designed based on the university subject focus, performance, governmental regulations and economic environment and sometimes lead to a conflict of interests. Our study aims to explore the strategic directions of HEIs strategy development. To achieve this goal, we run an exploratory research among twelve universities in developed country (Finland) and twelve universities based in transitional economy (Russia). Furthermore, within each country group we make a distinction between HEIs along two dimensions - subject focus and performance/ranking. Triangulating secondary data with the data of the interviews with university managers, we demonstrate a number of curious findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]