Important Dates
- Submission Deadline: 4 September 2023
- Publication: May/June 2024
Software is a driving force in today’s world. However, many businesses miss out on opportunities to turn innovative ideas into successful products and services. Companies struggle to transfer academic results and rather duplicate them in their research labs with more focus on practice. Yet, universities and academic research are not considering industry viability of their prototypes. The result is business risk such as integration with legacy systems and future technical debt accumulation.
Going from idea to impact is more than an iterative process from a need to a solution – it is an ongoing fight for survival. In order to innovate, companies and start-ups try to use technological advances that academia strives to transfer. Usually, this is a struggle given the industry focus on practice, while academic research looks only for an initial idea.
Both industry and academia face challenges in transferring technology effectively. Organizations, both academic and industrial, remain in their own silo, in which they know networks and practices – but eventually lose traction. Too much time is wasted from software research to getting a software product and to impact on software engineering practices.
To launch a successful software product or service, organizations must understand the value proposition, the market need, and the available technology. To create software products that endure, companies will benefit by engaging researchers and practitioners and creating a wide range of channels to foster collaborative innovation.
In this theme issue, IEEE Software welcome papers that examine the new and enduring challenges related to technology transfer in Software Engineering. We seek to provide valuable insights, lessons learned, and failure stories from companies, start-ups, universities, incubators, and collaborations between academia and industry. The issue also aims to outline concrete examples of successful and unsuccessful software projects that relied on technology transfer as well as the use of open-source software and the key factors that contributed to their outcomes. It intends to provide actionable insights and tips for overcoming common challenges in software innovation, such as building effective collaborations between academia and industry and identifying and prioritizing customer needs.
We invite submissions covering any aspect of how to translate research into software products including, but not limited to:
- Software-driven business models
- Experience reports on successes and failures in creating innovative products
- Software product management in collaborative partnerships with industry and universities
- Models of collaboration between industry and academia
- Formats of innovation pipelines, such as incubators, start-ups, etc.
- Sustaining knowledge and its effective transfer during cost-saving programs
- Lean and agile start-ups with fast results
- Stages in and barriers to the creation of start-ups and spin-offs
- Methods and tools with which to integrate collaboration improvements between academy and industry that lead to innovation
- Technology transfer processes that enable pre-defined success factors and avoid barriers
- The role of open source software in advancing software engineering technologies and enabling adoption at scale within industries
- Best practices and lessons learned from other engineering disciplines with takeaways for Software Engineering
- A Point-counterpoint article on value and innovation
The theme issue will concern practice and will target real cases that can be good examples with which to inspire others. We, therefore, discourage submissions presenting only theoretical models of technology transfer without substantial evidence and examples of its application in practice.
Submission Guidelines
For author information and guidelines on submission criteria, please visit the Software’s Author Information page. Please submit papers through the ScholarOne system, and be sure to select the special issue name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the ScholarOne portal.
Questions?
Please contact the guest editors at sw2-24@computer.org.
Guest Editors:
- Christof Ebert, Vector, Germany
- Silvia Abrahão, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
- V.S. Mani, Siemens Healthineers, India
