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

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Energizing collaborative industry-academia learning : a present case and future visions © 2022 the Authors Published version Kettunen, Petri; Järvinen, Janne; Mikkonen, Tommi; Männistö, Tomi Kettunen, P., Järvinen, J., Mikkonen, T., & Männistö, T. (2022). Energizing collaborative industryacademia learning : a present case and future visions. European Journal of Futures Research, 10, Article 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40309-022-00196-5 2022 Kettunenetal. European Journal of Futures Research (2022) 10:8 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40309-022-00196-5 RESEARCH ARTICLE Energizing collaborative industry-academia learning: apresent case andfuture visions Petri Kettunen1* , Janne Järvinen2 , Tommi Mikkonen1,3 and Tomi Männistö1 Abstract In Industry-Academia Collaborations (IAC) both academic, scientific research results and industrial practitioner findings and experiences are produced. Both types of knowledge should be gathered, codified, and disseminated efficiently and effectively. This paper investigates a recent (2014–2017) large-scale IAC R&D&I program case (Need for Speed, N4S) from a learning perspective. It was one of the programs in the Finnish SHOK (Strategic Centres of Science, Technology, and Innovation) system. The theoretical bases are in innovation management, knowledge management, and higher education (university) pedagogy. In the future, IAC projects should be more and more commonplace since major innovations are hardly ever done in isolation, not even by the largest companies. Both intra-organizational and inter-organizational learning networks are increasingly critical success factors. Collaborative learning capabilities will thus be required more often from all the participating parties. Efficient and effective knowledge creation and sharing are underpinning future core competencies. In this paper, we present and evaluate a collaboratively created and publicly shared digital knowledge repository called “Treasure Chest” produced during our case program. The starting point was a jointly created Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA), which defined the main research themes and listed motivating research questions to begin with—i.e., intended learning outcomes (ILO). During the 4-year program, our collaborative industry-academia (I-A) learning process produced a range of theoretical and empirical results, which were iteratively collected and packaged into the Treasure Chest repository. Outstandingly, it contained, in addition to traditional research documents, narratives of the industrial learning experiences and more than 100 actionable knowledge items. In conclusion, our vision of the future is that such transparently shared, ambitious, and versatile outcome goals with a continuous integrative collection of the results are keys to effective networked I-A collaboration and learning. In that way, the N4S largely avoided the general problem of often conflicting motives between industrial firms seeking answers and applied solutions to their immediate practical problems and academic researchers aiming at more generalizable knowledge creation and high-quality scientific publications. Keywords: Industry-Academia Collaboration, Learning networks, Innovation ecosystems © The Author(s) 2022. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visithttp:// creat iveco mmons. org/ licen ses/ by/4. 0/. Introduction In Industry-Academia Collaborations (IAC), both academic, scientific research results and industrial practitioner findings and experiences are produced. Both types of knowledge should be gathered, codified, and disseminated efficiently and effectively. This paper investigates a recent large-scale IAC R&D&I program case called Need for Speed (N4S) [1]. The industry-driven research program was executed in 2014–2017. It was at that time the biggest Finnish national investment in software-related research with a budget of over 50 M€ involving 40 leading Finnish software-intensive companies and research organizations. In total, roughly 500 people participated in the program over the years. We investigate the N4S IAC from knowledge creation and learning perspectives. The theoretical bases are in Open Access European Journal of Futures Research *Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Page 2 of 16 Kettunenetal. European Journal of Futures Research (2022) 10:8 innovation management, knowledge management, and higher education (university) pedagogy. During the 4-year program, our energized, collaborative I-A learning process produced a wide range of theoretical and empirical N4S consortia results, which were iteratively collected and jointly packaged into the shared repository called Treasure Chest available in the public domain. It helps companies to make use of the possibilities of digitalization and provides also advices for postdigitalization activities. The authors participated in the program. The second and third authors led the program representing the industrial and academic perspectives, respectively. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The following section frames the empirical landscape of industry-academia collaboration with recognized success factors and challenges. The next section describes our N4S case, and the succeeding section presents the empirical results. We then discuss the findings, experiences, and lessons learned with managerial and theoretical implications. Finally, we conclude with practical suggestions and pointers to further research work. Challenges andsuccess factors ofeffective industry‑academia collaboration In the future, IAC projects will probably be more and more commonplace since major innovations are hardly ever done in isolation, not even by the largest companies. Especially the current and future grand challenges of for example energy systems transformations coupled with digitalization require multidisciplinary research and new knowledge creation and acquisition in many different domains. Often, no single company possesses all. There are increasing needs for bi-directional knowledge cocreation and technology transfers between industry and academia. Software is increasingly a key enabling technology (KET) for industrial innovations also in non-ICT companies. Since the pace of product development is accelerating in almost all industry sectors, companies need speed for their software creation and production processes. In academic context, empirical software engineering research has been advancing for decades. However, in order to produce practical value and utility, the research knowledge and technological development must be transferred to industrial companies in actionable forms. There are also increasing demands for transferring knowledge and new technology the other way around from software-related industries to academia in order to inform researchers about relevant research questions, industrial opportunities, and practitioners’ challenges. To be effective, such knowledge and technology transfer requires often industrial domain knowledge and practical experience not necessarily possessed by academic software researchers. Overall, it follows that there are increasing needs and demands for effective IAC research endeavors. However, like highlighted above, there are many challenges to overcome. On the other hand, a lot is known about the key success factors of IAC programs. IAC has been investigated quite extensively over the years in many different disciplines and from multiple viewpoints (e.g., [2–4]). It has also been examined in the context of software research (e.g., [5–9]). Table1 presents an aggregated summary of the literature review on typical challenges and success factors of effective IAC in the software research domain. Notably, there are already prior publications describing and evaluating the N4S program’s overall research and development approach [10, 11]. Those are included in Table1. In general, both intra-organizational and inter-organizational learning networks are increasingly considered critical success factors. Collaborative learning capabilities will thus be required more often from all the participating parties. Efficient and effective knowledge creation and sharing are then underpinning future core competencies. Case Need forSpeed (N4S) The Need for Speed (N4S) research program was funded by Tekes (nowadays Business Finland) as the Finnish SHOK (Strategic Centres of Science, Technology, and Innovation) program in 2014–2017 [17]. The consortia consisted initially of 11 large industrial organizations, 14 SMEs, and 10 research institutes and universities. All the authors of the present paper participated in the program. The second author acted as the program leader (Focus Area Director, FAD) and the third author as the academic coordinator (ACO). The second actor was at the time employed by the so-called driver company of the program. Moreover, the first author contributed especially to the Treasure Chest development and dissemination. The overarching ambition of the N4S program was stated as follows: “N4S will create the foundation for the Finnish software intensive businesses in the new digital economy”. Consequently, the long-term plan of N4S was to serve other companies where software plays a dominant role—by making the program’s results, tools, and processes widely available. The starting point of the N4S program was a jointly created Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) [18]. It defined the strategic main research themes and listed motivating research questions to begin with as follows: Page 3 of 16 Kettunenetal. European Journal of Futures Research (2022) 10:8 “N4S adopts a real-time experimental business model and provides capability for instant value delivery based upon deep customer insight”: 1) Delivering value in real time 2) Deep customer insight—better business hit-rate 3) Mercury business—find the new money In the SRIA document, each of the three above research themes (breakthrough targets) was further elaborated with specific focus areas, goals, and envisioned results. There were motivating and engaging metaphors like “Goal-Driven Hunting Culture” for the Mercury Business and instant value delivery by just “pushing one button”. In addition to the strategic research goals stated in the SRIA, each industrial partner company defined at least one business case [19]. There were 49 cases defined in the beginning of the program. Each case had an industrial business owner and an academic research coordinator. Typically multiple research partners worked on each business case. Results In this paper, we contribute by exhibiting and analyzing the collaboratively created and publicly shared digital knowledge repository called Treasure Chest produced during the N4S program. Conceptually, the Treasure Chest comprises the following main elements: Table 1 Prior and related works on IAC 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 cocreation, 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 costbenefit 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] Page 4 of 16 Kettunenetal. European Journal of Futures Research (2022) 10:8 1) Knowledge items 2) Viewing, filtering, and searching mechanisms for accessing them. The Treasure Chest was implemented as a publicly available web service. Figure1 illustrates the web main page. In the following, we first describe the organization, structure, and the information item categories of the Treasure Chest repository with illustrations of the actual web site. We then exhibit certain representative examples of each item type. Outstandingly, it contains, in addition to traditional research documents, narratives of the industrial learning experiences and more than 100 actionable knowledge items (called Gold Nuggets). The Treasure Chest consists of the following main parts and sections (see Fig.2): (1) Main strategic themes (2) Guiding and triggering questions to explore each theme from typical angles (3) Solutions for the different research focus areas in each theme (4) Narratives from industrial and academic partners (5) Book publications (6) Keyword selectors (links) to explore the research publications The six parts (1)–(6) marked in Fig.2 work in practice for the user as follows: (1) By selecting (“clicking”) the icons of the three main themes, a list of all the related Gold Nugget knowledge items is displayed. The textual listing shows the titles of the items (in alphabetical order). (2) By selecting the different statements, designated subsets of the Gold Nuggets under the main theme are listed (in alphabetical order). (3) This section tabulates the research focus areas as stated in the N4S SRIA [18]. By selecting them, the corresponding subsets of the Gold Nuggets are listed (in alphabetical order). (4) Narratives are free-form reports of the N4S program achievements, works, results, and experiences written by each industrial and academic partner. Typically, they embed links to the related Gold Nuggets and research publications. (5) In addition to research publications, a collection of practitioner-oriented books were co-authored. This section provides links to access them. (6) During the program, more than 200 hundred publications (mostly research papers) were produced. Much emphasis, however, was also put in elaborating publications intended for practitioners by a professional journalist who was on program staff. This Fig. 1 N4S Treasure Chest home page (excerpt) Page 5 of 16 Kettunenetal. European Journal of Futures Research (2022) 10:8 Fig. 2 N4S Treasure Chest main organization and sectioning Page 6 of 16 Kettunenetal. European Journal of Futures Research (2022) 10:8 section of the Treasure Chest provides a tabularized set of keywords to browse them. In the Treasure Chest, all the Gold Nuggets have the same defined format as presented in Table2. The “Context” field intends to suggest where the particular Gold Nugget is most suitable to be applied. This is just an indicative suggestion as the real situations may vary. The two possible values are defined as follows: • EXPLORATION: Discovering new product and service ideas and/or markets, inventing new business models; Feeding the realization for EXPLOITATION. • EXPLOITATION: Implementing new products and services following the opportunities, developing new features for the products based on the feedback; Detecting potential new opportunities for further EXPLORATION. In the “Maturity of the organization” field, the NovicePractitioner-Elite ranking suggests the familiarity and experience of organization with respect to the Gold Nugget topic getting most benefits out of the nugget. The Novice-Practitioner-Elite ranking is, however, just an indicative suggestion as the real situations may vary. Altogether, the Treasure Chest repository includes 171 Gold Nuggets. Table3 illustrates one example. It was created collaboratively with research partners and an industrial company partner including a co-authored scientific conference paper. The narratives (part 4 in Fig.2) varied a lot for different industrial and academic partners reflecting the diversity and richness of the research, development, and innovation done during the N4S program. The following are some examples of the titles: • 3 Years of continuous everything • Amplifying the cycle between data and impact • Continuous value definition (CE), actualization (CD), and determination (CX) practices and enabling capabilities development for real-time business Finally, the Treasure Chest launching was publicly promoted at the end of the N4S program in 2017 as shown in Fig.3. In addition, the individual Gold Nuggets were advertised with a long series of Twitter messages by the end of 2017 (see @N4S_fi). The Treasure Chest was also one of the key outcomes highlighted in the N4S program final reporting as depicted in Fig.4. Discussion Industry‑academia cooperation inpraxis As the N4S program consortium comprised many industrial and academic partners (initially 25 and 10, respectively), there were many collaboration relationships and consequently various specific ways of working in cooperation. However, certain common patterns and features can be inferred. Table4 decribes such. Here, we utilize a recent framework of evaluating IAC in Finland [20]. In hindsight, the SRIA envisaged a shared, energizing picture of the future. The three research themes depicted scenario paths to reach such futures. From the learning perspective, we can discern that the SRIA research goals and expected results actually defined intended learning outcomes (ILO) for everyone both in the industry and in the academia. Table 2 Gold Nugget template <Gold nugget name> Status What is the status of the nugget? fixed options: Idea | Under development | Complete/Done Attachments Optional supplementary material of the nugget Links Relates Optional connections to related nuggets Purpose What is the purpose of the nugget, when to use it? Short summarizing description of the nugget. Benefits What benefits are expected from the use of the nugget? Experiences and examples / cases What kind of experiences are available? What business examples from partners are available? Primary focus area Fixed options based on N4S SRIA (Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda) Additional information Optional additional information of the nugget Primary organization Nugget “owner” COP Real-time value delivery | deep customer insight | mercury business Context Explore | exploit Maturity of the organization Novice | practitioner | elite Page 7 of 16 Kettunenetal. European Journal of Futures Research (2022) 10:8 An important aspect of setting such an engaging vision was that the SRIA document was created with a joint effort by a large group (altogether 31 people, including the authors of the present paper) representing both the industrial partners and the research organizations (18 academic authors of which 9 professors). Interestingly, Table 3 Gold Nugget example CS/CX management dashboard Status Done Attachments <Illustrative handout> (pdf) <Research paper conference presentation> (pdf) Links Relates relates to N4S continuous X capability development relates to Framework for UX KPI dashboard Purpose Structure, analysis, and design of a B2B company CS/CX management system Benefits Realizing systemic predictive B2B customer experience and satisfaction management: Customer satisfaction (CS) is continuously important in modern industrial business environments. However, it is inherently affective even in B2B contexts and thus not directly controllable. Satisfaction impacting customer experiences (CX), respectively, can be managed by the supplier company. The goals have to be made transparent to the entire organization for producing the experiences with their current status and projected progress. A transparent measurement system is thus needed. Experiences and examples / cases <Poster> (pdf) Primary focus area Data collection, real-time feedback from real customers Data analysis, visualization and interpretation Additional information <Related program internal working items> Primary organization University of Helsinki COP Deep customer insight Context Explore, exploit Maturity of the organization Practitioner, elite Fig. 3 N4S Treasure Chest launching (excerpt) Page 8 of 16 Kettunenetal. European Journal of Futures Research (2022) 10:8 the actual writing was essentially accomplished in a couple of days during an intensive writing session at offsite premises. Before that, industrial needs and expectations were collected and captured as business case proposals and there were several collaborative preparation workshops (in 2013). Notably, most of the industrial partner participants were in senior managerial positions in the companies. They had governing responsibilities and longer-term interests in developing the organizations also prior to and following the N4S program. Such setups can be seen to justify the relevance of the research goals and strengthen the industrial commitments. Furthermore, such resourcing is likely to encourage the academic partners to aim excellence in their research. In the “Results” section, we have presented the Treasure Chest top-down and outside-in. However, in real life, we constructed it mostly the other way around during the 4-year program: 1. Publications (parts 5 and 6 in Fig.2) 2. Gold Nuggets Fig. 4 Treasure Chest in the N4S final outcomes reportage Table 4 N4S cooperation with respect to general IAC elements IAC points [20] Case N4S Who are the cooperating parties? What characteristics do they have? • Many of the N4S partners had been collaborating in a previous SHOK program (Cloud Software), so there were established relationships and even personal contact networks in place. • In addition, especially the quarterly joint review sessions provided face-to-face opportunities to make new contacts. Reasons and motives to start cooperating • SRIA: The distinct research goals for each strategic research theme (3) scoped and focused the overall research objectives. Each research partner was allowed to select the topics according to their research interests and expertise but in alignment with the industrial needs. • The industrial partners expressed and reasoned their goals and needs in the business case descriptions. What cooperation and how? Means of interaction, types, and outcomes • Joint publications writing • Workshopping (often in the company premises) • Quarterly reviews (e.g., joint presentations, demos, posters) • Common program information sharing system and repository (confluence) • Treasure chest: uniting collection and packaging What obstacles are there to start the cooperation or succeeding? • Who is and should be working with whom? • How much time and effort can each partner invest? • How can the academic partners gain appropriate and sufficient industrial domain knowledge? What factors enable successful cooperation? • Engaging shared efforts and targets (e.g., workshops, joint publications) • Personal contacts, trust, transparent and continuous information/knowledge sharing • Mutual flexibility and accommodating change in goal-setting and attainment Page 15 of 16 Kettunenetal. European Journal of Futures Research (2022) 10:8 very much valid. Interestingly enough, digitalization has significantly accelerated in many fields during the past year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the current EU aims for supporting digital and green developments are topical for most every industrial sector for several years to come. It is perhaps fair to say that the grand vision of the program was not fully was achieved by 2017. However, considering futures research, that is the very idea of a visionary picture of the future as an ideal “dream” state. We maintain that the vision was—and still is—desirable and plausible, and the N4S IAC program progressed significantly in the scenario path towards that vision. During the 4-year journey, we learned a lot together as manifested by the Treasure Chest. Overall, a key success factor of the industry-driven N4S program was that it created and sustained an environment and atmosphere, which was conducive for mutually beneficial and energizing long-term (4 years) industry-academia collaboration. The jointly created, future-oriented SRIA chartered highly ambitious research goals suitable and attractive for all the academic partners and researchers to contribute on the one hand and the designated focus areas and goals were relevant and rational for the industrial partners on the other hand. With such headings and settings, collaborative participatory research was supported and lucrative. Acknowledgements There are no particular ones. Authors’ contributions The manuscript has been compiled jointly by the authors following the associated conference abstract (https://futuresconference2020.files.wordpress. com/2021/06/lf-2021-boa-1.pdf) and the related conference presentation presented by the first author. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. Funding There are no funding sources. Availability of data and materials There are no supplementary data sources. Declarations Ethics approval and consent to participate There are no human participants involved. 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