Strategy and higher education: theory and practice at the time of cross-sector collaboration

Beyond the traditional duties of teaching and research, universities have started to include new kinds of activities in their agenda, fostering the debate on social and economic issues and sharing the products of their research as solutions for society. They have started to build partnerships with several actors in order to combine efforts, experiences, and resources in a crosssectoral collaboration perspective, and the aim of this thesis is to understand how such an innovative perspective can help universities to generate public value. To do so, the new strategic approach adopted by higher education institutions will be analyzed, firstly by a theoretical point of view and then looking at what Italian universities are practically doing within society, even during an extraordinary time such as that characterized by the spread of Covid-19. The empirical analyses will be on the missions effectively pursued by higher education institutions, on what are their efforts in terms of social engagement and how they have been able to perform distance learning: if education is the key to growth and development, the findings of this study will confirm the prominent role of universities.