Archetypes for Engaged Scholarship in Information Systems

This article addresses the topic of university-industry collaboration (UIC), a term that is used to describe the active engagement of a company (or companies) in a joint research project with academics. The objectives and motivations of UIC have been discussed widely in the literature and are summarised in this article. We were particularly interested in the factors that influence the setup of research projects that make them a 'successful' UIC. The paper reports on the results of a questionnaire-based survey of UIC and interviews with senior IS scholars, who have extensive experience in UIC. We present typical forms of collaboration, which we call archetypes, with their defining characteristics and argue that UIC is a valuable research strategy, which we as IS researchers should pursue in order to obtain relevance in our research.