Engaging researchers to help organizational planning: lessons learned from KSC's ongoing transition management project

The contributions of this paper are a process, model and set of lessons learned for collaborative research studies between industry and a university focused on planning for organizational issues unfamiliar to the industrial partner. The process, model, and lessons learned are discussed using Kennedy Space Center's (KSCs) project to develop an organizational transition plan. Industry and a university receive complementary benefits from collaborative knowledge creation, assimilation and dissemination efforts. The model shows how the mutual quest for knowledge for the organization's projects can be integrated with a university's quest for new knowledge. The collaborative relationship attempts to balance organizational specific issues such as culture and credibility with the validity research issues. Lessons learned are given from both the industry and university participants. The paper is useful to technology management by providing a process, model and set of lessons learned to consider when developing collaborative research projects on technology management.