In order for the conduct of collaborative research projects and their outcomes to be valuable for both research and practice it is necessary to successfully address a number of sociotechnical challenges in the field of software engineering. Collaborative research involving researchers and practitionersrelated to software systems have utilised a variety of different research approaches. Adoption of an effective research approach for the situation at hand in a research project may significantly contribute to project success. Experiences from collaborative research show that action case can be an appropriate choice of approach for addressing socio-technical challenges in the software domain, which is appealing to both practitioners and researchers. This paper elaborates on a number of challenges for successful conduct of collaborative research projects and reports on experiences from use of action case as a research approach for conduct of collaborative research related to software systems.