Booting and Rebooting Academia-Industry Collaborations Within Software Engineering Courses

Abstract

Collaboration between academia and industry for education is a common practice, and several academic institutions already benefit from that. While best practices have been shared on how to run these collaborations, the process of starting these collaborations is less clear. Even long established schemes, like the one running at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) for 50 years, struggle to remember how it originally started, or how to keep it running after the original initiators quit. The aim of this paper is to propose the steps to start and sustain a collaboration framework between academic courses and industrial collaborators, and in the context of Software Engi- neering. The framework was originally conceived, and deployed from scratch, at the University of Groningen (RUG): so far it has successfully engaged several industrial partners, and several dozens of projects deployed. The framework and its steps are also. usable to reboot other similar collaboration schemes, especially when (like at NTNU) their originators have left the institution.