Working Agile to Speed Up Research With Industry: Five Independence Principles

Abstract

One of the obstacles to the ability of research to make an impact on industry resides on the research process itself. Today, there is a need to accelerate the means for research to support industrial transformation. At the same time, there is the need to maintain scientific rigorousness, which often requires time. To solve this trade-off, this paper evaluates existing research approaches through the lenses of agile development. The analysis is based on a simulation of research process architectures, and on observations made over several research projects with industry. The results of this analysis highlight five light-but-sufficient rules of research project behavior to keep momentum, motivation and trust when doing research with industry. The paper demonstrates the use of these five rules in a “research sprint” conducted iwith two automotive OEMs.

Problem decomposition: the key to Agile sprints in Design Research

“…Based on the agile-focused assessment of existing research approaches and observations made on several industryacademia research projects, Panarotto et al (2023) proposed "Agile Design Research" (Agile DR, Figure 1) to keep momentum, motivation and trust when doing research with industry (while preserving scientific rigour).…”

“…Figure 1. Agile DR (Panarotto et al, 2023), mapped onto a scrum framework Agile DR is intended to be a complement to established research methodologies (such as DRM) through five light-butsufficient rules of project behaviour. These five rules are adapting the twelve original principles of agile development (Beck et al, 2001) to the DR context.…”

“…It is therefore arguably important to find out how DR can be made more effective and iterative. For example, Panarotto et al (2023) proposed a few practical guidelines to conduct intervention-based DR inspired by "agile development", drawing from the works such as Beck et al (2001). This set of guidelines, called "Agile Design Research" (Agile DR), is based on two main principles 1) the research problems are decomposed and made as independent as possible from each other, so that a whole DRM "loop" can be conducted for one problem at a time.…”