Identifying the Research Needs of Four Large High Technology Companies

Software excellence is defined as the adoption of advanced software techniques and methods to cope with the complexity and the needs of modern software systems. To accomplish this objective, the companies that develop software intensive systems must be able to follow and adopt the state-of-the-art developments in computer science and technology. In general, this implies carrying out research activities with the relevant universities. This paper presents an overview of a pilot implementation of the approach termed as “Describe, Search and Acquire the Required Capability” (DESARC), which aims at establishing a more effective identification of research projects, allocation of these research projects to research groups and the cooperation between universities and industry. In our previous publication [1], we have presented the initial results of the method. Currently, we have extended this study and applied it in total to four large high-technology companies. This paper can be useful for the strategic developers who are interested in setting up university-industry cooperation and for the researchers who want to have an industrial view of the trends on computer science and software engineering.