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In the context of public universities the use of the entrepreneurial orientation construct is not widespread and still there is no precise definition of what it means. It is, in fact, necessary to consider the peculiarities of universities and then adopt a coherent operationalization of the construct. The main aim of this paper is to identify the determinant attributes of the entrepreneurial orientation within the Italian universities. To this aim, the study moves from a recent and innovative definition of the public universities' entrepreneurial orientation proposed in the literature, and is based on survey data from 103 Italian university departments. A multiple regression analysis and an importance-performance analysis are used to investigate the relationship between the dimensions and the single items used to operationalize the entrepreneurial orientation and the entrepreneurial orientation perceived by the surveyed department heads. The findings show that not all the dimensions and the items considered affect in the same way the Italian university entrepreneurial orientation. Implications and limitations are discussed.