Increasing Industry-Academia Collaboration: Types of Regional Software Engineering Companies and Their Needs from Academia

Abstract

Improvements in the industry-academia collaboration have been argued to bring wide range of benefits for both communities, increasing innovation capacity for industry and providing academy access to real-world environments. However, building close collaborative ties between SE industry and academia has been slow and difficult. Academia has struggled to keep pace with SE engineering profession in reacting to new platforms and trends and in creating realistic SE learning environments for the students. Consequently, the students’ initial experiences in the industry have turned out to be rather different than their education. This paper describes early efforts to increase industry-academia collaboration in the Finnish region of South Savo. Through the process of searching, contacting, and interviewing regional SE companies, we began to see similarities and differences between SE companies in the region. In this paper, we describe five emerged archetypes of regional SE companies and report their preferences for industry-academia collaboration.