Joined Paper with Austrian SMEs

The Collaboration between industry and academia is not always easy to accomplish. The respective incentives differ considerably and sometimes, even if there is mutual interest in doing something together, it is not possible to do anything together, like writing a joined paper and submit it to a conference.

While paper writing is important in academia, industry - especially SMEs - are not really interested in writing papers with academia. One of the first questions that is asked is: Ok, this sounds interesting. We like this idea. But, how can we use this idea for our customers? What is the product? Sometimes, it is difficult to explain that there is no immediate benefit for customers by writing a paper with academia, but opens possibilities for future developments. Euphemistically speaking, a joined paper can be a spark which paves the way for future inventions.

We, at the DSG - http://www.infosys.tuwien.ac.at/ - were lucky and we had the opportunity to collaborate with TISCO - http://tisco.at/ - to write a joined paper which we submitted to the ICIW - http://www.iaria.org/conferences2010/ICIW10.html - and that was accepted (of course, I might add :-))

For the future, we plan an additional joined paper with another austrian SME called iKANGAi http://www.ikangai.com/  They work in a different field, and it's certainly challenging to find mutual interesting topics. But this is an exiting challenge and we are more than willing to take it.

- Martin Treiber