Combining Design Science and Design Research Perspectives--Findings of Three Prototyping Projects

A challenge that information system researchers face in general is to combine the goals of generating new scientific knowledge while at the same time producing practically relevant research results, e.g., in the form of IT artifacts. To combine both, researchers and practitioners need to collaborate to develop and employ methods that enable both the systematic generation of scientific insights as well as the knowledge exchange between academia and industry. In this paper, we present the findings of a research project where we entered into an industry-academic collaboration involving three software development projects. We used a design science research approach to observe and accompany the project and to guide the scientific discovery process. In the course of our research process we developed an innovative research model that integrates our experiences from a research project with existing design science research models.