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Organisational studies are a relatively young field of study. In fact some authors claim that it was only in the beginning of the 20th , with the emergence of large organisations characteristic of industrialized societies, that organisations began to be investigated systematically (Zellweger-Moser, 2003, p. 71). It was Morgan (2006) who suggested to use metaphors to illustrate the functioning of organizations. One of the metaphors suggested is the organisation as organism, another the organisation as a brain. The latter is a classic in the cybernetics and system theories studies (Zellweger-Moser, 2003).
The university is understood to be a complex adaptive system (as described in section 1.2.2., 1.2.3., and Annex C), and all components of knowledge entrepreneurship and all independent variables are understood to have  strange attractor qualities. Strategy and practice are singled out as the main focus subject of investigation, while other components (such as resources, structure and spatiality) make up the individual settings of the institutions and are explored as independent variables. So what is strategy and practice supposed to imply?
1.2.5.1. Strategy and Practice
Strategy can be conceptualized to contain the daily practices as continuously emergent strategy. Andrews has given such an definition: “Corporate strategy is the pattern of decisions in a company that determines and reveals its objectives, purposes, or goals, produces the principal policies and plans for achieving those goals, and defines the range of business the company is to pursue, the kind of economics and human organization it is or intends to be, and the nature of the economic and non-economic contribution it intends to make to its stakeholders, employees, customers, and communities” (Andrews, 1971, pp. 18-19). In this research practice and strategy are two different activities. Strategy describes the process of consciously reflecting about and planning the current and future practice of the university. Put differently, the interest is on how to strategically deal with innovation, or as Drucker put it systematic innovation.
Drucker defined systematic innovation as “the purposeful and organized search fro changes, and it is the systematic analysis of the opportunities such changes might offer for economic or social innovation” (Drucker, 1985, p. 35). Practice on the other hand describes an activity that is currently routinely performed based on the implicit strategic approaches lived in the moment (by the individual organisational member and thereby producing the aggregated ‘real’ strategy performed by the organisation in the moment).
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