Strategies for Building Successful Company-University Research Collaborations

Company strategies for building and leveraging industry-university research collaborations are many and varied. This paper reports on strategies observed at North American technology companies including BNR, Northern Telecom, Qualcomm, Cisco, Bell Labs, Lucent, and Alcatel-Lucent. Strategies included a range of tactics focused on leveraging intellectual property portfolios, benchmarking processes and products, recruiting experienced technical talent, cost avoidance and reduction, and philanthropy. The strategies reported here build on the tactics reported in a paper presented by the first author at the second ICSE Workshop on Software Engineering Research and Industrial Practice held in Florence, 2015.