What Are the Strategies of Australia’s Universities? Arenas, Vehicles, Differentiators, Staging and Economic Logic

Because Australia’s universities have multiple missions, they also have a broad scope of operations. Notwithstanding this, there are a set of institutional mechanisms that ensure a large degree of sameness across the academic footprint of the universities. They lack fundamental differentiation. Also, the cost structure of the universities requires some faculties (cash cows) to generate free cash flow to fund the research operations of other faculties. Because university research is expensive, universities are trying to convince industry to fund more of this activity. However, universities have many obstacles to overcome in this endeavour.