Principles and a process for successful industry cooperation: the case of TUM and Munich Re

Research transfer projects should be beneficial and inspiring for both, the academic as well as the industrial partners. If the setting is inadequate they can, however, also be a source of frustration and a waste of time and money for all parties. In the last decade, the Chair of Software and Systems Engineering at Technische Universität München (TUM) participated in a series of eight research transfer projects, conducted jointly with the re-insurance company Munich Re. The common theme of these projects has been quality of software development artefacts. This cooperation has been exceptionally productive for both sides. Results of this continuous success are, for example, a university spin-off, a considerable number of publications, as well as more systematic and improved methods in software engineering at Munich Re. A corner stone to the fruitful cooperation has been the model of how the university and practitioners have been working together. In this paper, we look at the cooperation from the retrospective and identify a number of basic principles that contributed to the success of the cooperation. Aditionally, we illustrate our research process and approach which helps to realize these principles.