Industry-University Collaborations in Research for Information Systems

Research collaborations between industry and the academic community are now commonplace and continuing to flourish. While both entities are involved in problem solving, their motivations and objectives appear to be quite different; industrial research being primarily driven by business needs to improve cost, quality, and so forth, academic research ostensibly driven by the desire to push the boundaries of knowledge but in reality driven by the need to “publish or perish.” Recognizing the differences, and indeed the complementary aspects of these respective motivations and objectives, has been repeatedly cited in the literature as a critical success factor for such collaborations. While much has been written especially from the academic perspective on various aspects of research collaborations, there is relatively little from the industrial perspective, especially with regard to a management model, that could be used to guide such research project collaborations. This chapter is written from an industry perspective and it explores such a model specifically for managing information systems (IS) research projects. Nowadays, and increasingly so, the business of software production will follow a defined software process to provide good management of projects and to guide both the management and engineering aspects of development. This chapter suggests an extension of these principles to produce a process management framework that software companies can use for research project collaborations with universities.