“I am an Engaged Scholar”: A Typology of IS Researchers’ Engagement in Research with Industry

This paper addresses the topic of University-Industry Collaboration (UIC) in the academic discipline of Information Systems. The term UIC is used to describe the active engagement of an industry partner in a joint research project with academics. The objectives and motivations of UIC have been discussed widely and controversially in the literature. In our study, we were particularly interested in the factors that influence the setup of research projects. We started with an online survey in which we explore the influence of country of origin. The findings encouraged us to theorize about existing types of research engagements (which we define as UIC archetypes) related to the personality and the surrounding value system of the researcher. From the literature and our findings we developed an a priori framework of UIC archetypes which was then tested and refined using data from interviews with “successful” researchers. The findings show the characteristics (personality traits) and the influencing factors that shape the UIC archetypes. It will be interesting to see if the findings are meaningful to our readers and whether they can identify themselves from these UIC archetypes.