Higher education institutions embed a large variety of organizational practices regarding how to organize, plan, and implement managerial decisions and processes. This variation is amongst others related to the multiple relationships the institutions, disciplines and professions have in their networks, formal agreements, and practical cooperation with the actors and agencies of surrounding societies. Here, we focus upon the challenges and contradictions experienced by leaders of educational programmes within teacher education, engineering and health and social care. The professional educational programmes have increasingly been under pressure to strengthen their research capacity. At the same time, these programmes are characterized by strong relationships with the community of practitioners. How does leadership of these programmes seek to solve the challenges and contradictions between on the one hand catering for the relevance of the programmes and on the other hand strengthening the research capacity of the programmes?