Using a spiral approach to facilitate engineering research and education embedded in real industry settings

Engineering research and education is often done in collaboration with industrial partners through the Industry as Laboratory (IaL), and Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) paradigms. However, its findings are not always adopted, despite the use of well-established and rigorous research methodologies. Academia employs oftentimes extensive and time consuming analyses, while industry operates in smaller cycles with tangible intermediate results. This can lead to the industry losing interest in the research. The Spiral Approach for Systems Engineering Research (SASER) is an approach that aims to mitigate that risk. This can have a twofold benefit in the industry remaining interested, but also the researcher staying motivated. To apply this approach in practice and receive feedback from a broader audience of people we created the SEFI 2023 workshop entitled: “Using a spiral approach to facilitate engineering research and education embedded in real industry settings”. This workshop has the objective of discussing best practices when conducting engineering education and research in collaboration with industry. To achieve the planned learning outcomes, the workshop activities will follow a cycle of learn=>apply=>reflect on provided specific case studies that are developed in order to allow the application of SASER. The workshop was attended by 8 participants that were split into 2 groups of 4 people (the 2nd group further decided to split further into a group of 3 and one individual). The results of the case studies and the reflection of the participants in the workshop indicate a clear potential for SASER and are promising for further research and development.