University-industry collaborations have become central for research and innovation policies in most industrialized countries in the last decades. As companies are moving towards more distributed and open models of innovation, relying on external sources of knowledge (Chesbrough & Bogers, 2014; West & Bogers, 2014), universities are increasingly expected to stimulate the flow of knowledge across public and private sectors.In order to respond to these macro conditions, strategic planning has become increasingly integral to university operations with research universities developing each their own university strategy. While the subject of the university has been a of interest to scholars in disciplines such as entrepreneurship and innovation (D’este & Perkmann, 2011; Etzkowitz, Webster, Gebhardt, & Terra, 2000), research policy (Audretsch & Lehmann, 2005; Bonaccorsi & Daraio, 2007), economics (Forida & Cohen, 1999; Marek, 2012), strategic management issues confronting the universities, and how the relations to the private sectors are managed, have not been fully addressed (Bonaccorsi & Daraio, 2007; Siegel & Leih, 2018).The following study aims to explore the process of developing and implementing a strategy at a large public research institute consisting of 12 departments and part of one of the largest Danish universities. At the outset the study is the process of developing a university strategy which aims to fulfil the general university missions of research and education, but also the strategic decisions with focus on increased collaborations with public and private partners. As these decisions vary based on the local contexts and are guided by different organizational identities and local level strategies (Thornton, 2002) this study focuses on how a new practice for developing an open strategy shaped by multiple institutional logics spreads in the focal organization. Concretely, this study adopts the institutional logics perspective (Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012) in order to explore how actors, actions and context come together in pluralistic institutional environment and how societal, scientific and commercial logics impact the development of an open strategy at a university setting.