Requirements Eng (1998) 3:79-83 9 1998 Springer-Verlag London Limited Requirements Engineering Requirements Engineering and Industrial Uptake Philip Morris, Marcelo Masera and Marc Wilikens Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy Although there have been a number of research projects in requirements engineering, industrial uptake from these projects has rarely lived up to expectations. To investigate possible explanations for this and what potential mechanisms there may be for promoting industrial uptake of current and future requirement engineering R&D projects, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission organised and held a work- shop in Brussels. This paper describes the results of this workshop and outlines follow-up support activities. Keywords: Adoption; Problems and recommendations; Requirements engineering research 1. Introduction In October 1995, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) organised a workshop on requirements engineering (RE) to identify and prioritise industrial and technological needs [1]. It became evident that although there have been numerous research and development (R&D) projects in this domain at both national and European levels, industrial uptake, which is to be understood as the complete cycle from transfer to use of the technology, from R&D projects, has rarely lived up to expectations. Evidence supporting uptake from projects in Europe is slight. To understand the difficulties with industrial uptake, the Joint Research Centre organised a second workshop [2]. The aim of this workshop was to: Portions reprinted, with permission, from Proceedings of the Third International Conferenceon RequirementsEngineering(ICRE '98); Colorado Springs, Colorado,April 6-10, 1998; pp 130-137. 91998 IEEE Correspondence and offprint requests to: Philip Morris, Joint Research Centre, TP 210, I- 210 20 Ispra (VA), Italy. E-mail: Philip.Morris @jrc.it 9 identify and prioritise the problems encountered on RE R&D projects with industrial uptake; 9 identify and prioritise recommendations for improving industrial uptake. The aim of this paper is to: 9present the problems with, and the recommendations for, industrial uptake elicited from the workshop attendees; 9 describe how these results were acquired. 2. Workshop Form The workshop had 26 attendees. Ten participants were selected from former European and national research projects in RE. These participants were selected to provide evidence based upon their experience with R&D projects in RE. Three participants were also selected from the area of technology transfer. Their role was to suggest mechanisms for promoting industrial uptake from research projects based on their own experience with technology transfer. Ten further industrial attendees were invited. These were understood as potential customers for products resulting from research projects and activities in RE. These attendees did not give presentations, but were expected to play an active part in the discussion. The workshop was divided into four sessions. Session one provided technology developers and users the opportunity to articulate what they saw as the problems for industrial uptake, where the barriers are in the project life cycle, and suggestions for promoting industrial uptake. Session two identified an initial list of problems and recommendations that would serve as a base for refinement in session four. Session three provided participants who had experience in technology transfer the opportunity to express their ideas about how industrial uptake in RE may be promoted. Session four