Universities are in a state of active transformation both in the field of developing technologies for creating, storing and transmitting knowledge and in their organizational development. The globalization of education and research markets has formed a steady trend of universities' integration. The last decade sees the general process of institutes merging in many countries. Active reorganization of universities through their integration took place in theRussian Federationas well. Currently, the focus of organizational development of universities is shifting from intra-system restructuring to the formation of project and structural partnerships with key stakeholders, primarily belonging to the sphere of business. The impulse to searching new solutions in the universities' transformations originates from a whole range of state programs. Thus, in many regions of the Russian Federation 2017 saw the start of work on forming university centres of innovation, technological and social development of regions in partnership with enterprises and organizations. According to the results of the 2017 competitive selection, 51 universities received the status of such centres, including 22 key, 3 national research and 10 federal universities from 39 regions. Within the national technology development initiative, the project to create 15 research and educational centres puts forward theoretical and applied issues on designing a new type of universities' structural organization, which would represent diffusion, interpenetration of universities and their key stakeholders. This article aims at discussing the readiness of universities and their partners to create such structures, as well as at analysing existing practices, and institutional constraints. The study is new, as it introduces the term «dif- fuse structures» denoting a new type of weakly formalized universities with key stakeholders, and analyzes the level of maturity of such structures based on surveys. The purpose of the article is to study the attitude of regional stakeholders of universities to the formation and development of diffuse structures and processes that ensure effective interaction for solving the objectives of social and economic development of territories and industries.