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Table 1 Prior and related works on IAC

From: Energizing collaborative industry-academia learning: a present case and future visions

Themes

Results, experiences, and suggestions

Success factors

• Lean Research Approach: business cases (defined by industrial organizations with business impact); agile continuous planning and research sprints; transparent information, artifact, and asset sharing [10]

• Research sprints (3 months) for continuous, direct business impact, 1-n and n-1 relations between research and industrial organizations (scaling), fast pace and rhythm of joint interaction occasions (program-wide quarterly review meetings), considering also non-technical changes and impacts in the particular industrial contexts, mindset and attitude towards co-creation, company co-operation, and benchmarking supported by researchers; academic researchers genuinely understanding and even anticipating specific industrial needs and technological developments [11]

• Buy-in and support from company management, champion at the company [12]

• Need orientation (addressing perceived real-life industry problems and possibilities), management engagement (problem formulation and research conduct); Collaborative research should be agile [13].

• Close collaboration realized with applied agile methodologies (Scrum): 6-month sprints, collaboration ceremonies (monthly stands and retrospectives); collaboration at different levels between companies and universities with frequent opportunities to meet [14]

• Working as one team, identifying the “right” (SE research) problem, ensuring practicality and applicability, conducting cost-benefit analysis, maturity of research prototype tools, encouraging further adoptions [8]

• Sustainable long-term research collaboration with mutual trust and respect coming with working and spending time together; industry management commitment, champion as the main driver of the collaboration on the industry-side; researchers’ social skills; awareness of the industrial expectations and commitment to deliver accordingly; Tying the research into the daily work at the industry partner; Understanding how the qualitative information could be combined with the quantitative data in the industrial context [15]

• Selecting an appropriate research methodology based on the specific primary research objectives and the scope of the research [9]

• Design science approach: Producing viable artifacts that companies appreciate, research activities easily integrated into the company daily business and day-to-day work of practitioners; Industry champion driving the collaboration from the industry side, joint team based on a mutual learning and exchange of knowledge [16]

Difficulties and problems

• Funding organizations expecting linear up-front research proposals and plans (waterfallish) [10]

• Company strategy and technology changes, collaborative and iterative way of working not suiting everybody [10]

• Academics learning to be agile toward industry needs, practitioners learning to appreciate research rigor requires time and continuous reflection efforts; Industry and academia having different objectives and incentives [13].

• Academia and industry having by nature different governing variables, goals, and pacing; working jointly during the period of understanding the problem, organizing and executing the joint work, communicating with different stakeholders; scaling I-A research [14]

• Knowledge exchange vs. technology transfer; industrial challenge vs. actual problem; Industry deadlines and budgets overriding; systemic problems in the academic system (academic reward system); earning mutual trust and respect [15]

• Mismatch between practitioners and researchers expectations [16]

• Industrial companies having limited resources (especially time) for academic research related “extra work”; making research organizations to work jointly rather than even competing with each other [11]