Accelerating Digital Transformation
Effective collaboration between industry and academia is hard. This is the case because of a mismatch in incentives between researchers and industry practitioners that is quite significant and causes natural tension points. Industry practitioners, in the end, want to turn the fruits of the collaboration into benefits for the business. Researchers are interested in high profile publications. Industry often seeks to achieve these benefits as fast as possible whereas researchers often work on a time line that is much more relaxed. Industry wants access to experts in the field whereas researchers often use collaboration as an education and training context for PhD students and early career staff.
For collaboration between multiple companies and universities to be successful, a carefully designed set of mechanisms needs to be put in place to ensure that the incentives for companies and researchers are as aligned as possible. Over the last decade, Software Center has evolved a set of mechanisms that allow the collaboration between the member companies and the universities to not only survive but positively thrive. These mechanisms include the sprint model where all activities have a six month sprint heartbeat, a mechanism where it is the companies, rather than the researchers, that prioritize and fund the research projects, an active and engaged steering committee and several types of recurring events that allow for frequent dissemination of results as well as constructive engagement around topics of interest.
The first printed batch of the book is reserved for the industrial partners in Software Center who can order up to 10 copies, but if many are interested we will print more copies. Order your copies here:
https://forms.gle/76QC8cDvZSHN9b8B7