The role of universities in economic growth and innovation is increasingly emphasized today and pressures on universities are mounting. Thus, universities are increasingly being pressured to act strategically in terms of their third mission (TM). However, we know very little about university-specific strategic orientations towards their TM. Existing studies that focus on the characterization of universities have been devoted to the identification and analysis of universities’ strategies towards knowledge transfer activities in terms of their TM. In addition, top management’s experiences and interpretations of the TM have been excluded from the literature, regardless of the fact that the top managers are the key strategy-makers of their universities. Hence, we ask: What are the main strategic orientations towards the TM in universities from the perspective of the university’s top management? We offer data from the top management of all Finnish universities and focus on their experiences as they are the highest strategy-makers of universities. As a result, the evidence presented shows that there are four main strategic orientations towards TM, namely: 1) the research strategy, 2) the service-to-society strategy, 3) the knowledge-application strategy and 4) the economic-value-creation strategy. Our findings also reveal that the typology of orientations places the universities on a 2x2 matrix defined by two polar types, representing the traditionalist universities vs. entrepreneurial universities, and societal development-oriented universities vs. self-empowered universities at opposite ends.
