Industrial doctoral projects are one possible way to promote knowledge transfer between universities and commercial organizations. These projects are anchored and initiated in problems identified by business organizations, further discussed and refined by researchers from related research areas and last approximately four-five years. Although, there are a number of benefits of such interdisciplinary projects, there are also associated challenges. The challenges often relate to differences in cultures, interests and goals of the involved parties. The hypothesis behind our study is that systematic communication on business values and academic requirements within the specific doctoral projects considerably increases the probability of success of the projects by producing academic and industrial values as well as saves time.

This paper presents the Thesis Steering Model (TSM), an instrument developed to support systematic communication and collaboration for the different stakeholders involved in industrial doctoral projects. The development of TSM is based on project management tools used by organizations, and on national requirements for postgraduate education. TSM emphasizes the early stages of a project. The paper includes basic motivations and issues in developing the TSM, as well as its use in the view of academic literature in the subject. The results illustrate the use of TSM for seven doctoral projects within a postgraduate school in applied informatics. The experiences from the first two years in use are that benefits occur in terms of enhanced communication, mutual understanding and building long-term relations between industry and academy and giving more opportunity to the doctoral students to build a research identity associated to their own project. Additionally, we discuss the need and role of structured communication for resource handling and necessary intercultural collaboration activities needed during industrial doctoral projects.