Increased Value through Reduced Risk in Joint Industry / External Researcher Projects - Towards Guidelines

In this paper we compare two research projects in two different industry partners with academia researchers, studying work processes of each organization. The purpose is to provide some guidance to industrial organizations planning to do research with the help of external academia researchers, hopefully resulting in higher value of the research for the industrial partner. Both research projects studied span approximately six months. In case A, a researcher has visited the studied organization 2-3 days per week during six months, and has had access to virtually all material produced, all people, etc. The researcher had a strictly non-participant role. In case B, a researcher helped start the research project and did some �start-state� investigation. During the duration of the research project, he visited the studied organization a few times, and at the end, a set of short interviews were conducted in addition to analyzing questionnaires. This paper compares the two projects with respect to a number of characteristics: � An analysis of the two projects suggest that� A number of questions that can be asked in advance for an industry considering working with a researcher are suggested. A threat to the validity of this paper is that the analysis made in the paper was not anticipated in neither case A nor in case B in advance. This suggests that some of the information made during the original research projects might have been forgotten or lost before this analysis has been made. On the other hand, had a coming analysis like this been anticipated in advance, it is not unlikely that the research setup would have been different.