Research methodology for industry-academic collaboration – a case study

When industry and academia collaborate within an applied sociotechnical research project, it generates a complex context due to different means, goals, languages, and emergent practices. The industry is interested in developing projects, maximizing profit, and satisfying its clients and customers. Academia is oriented towards performing research to understand, explore, optimize, and verify meaningful statements. Different goals, timelines, ways of working, languages, and resources create too many emergent practices and friction in the research execution. In this paper, we perform a retrospective analysis on a research project conducted over a year that focused on the current and future state in nine companies and evaluated its use of research methodologies. A finding is the need to have well-defined industry cases, and we suggest criteria for achieving this. Additionally, we see emergent practices and dynamic environments influencing the research process in industry and academic research context.