The department has a long and solid tradition for interaction and knowledge exchange with private companies and public institutions. Over the last thirty years, there have been numerous research projects with external participants. Thus, our research has been made available to the Danish and international society. There have been approximately 18 spin-off companies (including Mjølner, Cryptomathic, Cetrea, and SCALGO) and a number of patent applications. We want to maintain the high level of interaction with private companies and public institutions. This produces a lot of interesting research themes ranging from smaller problems, which can be tackled with innovative use of existing knowledge, to more challenging problems that require long-term basic research.

Industry and public institutions also contribute to the education programmes at the department, e.g., via joint courses or student projects, and by their involvement in the advisory boards for our study programmes.

The department wants to further leverage the collaboration with the Alexandra Institute, which works with applied IT research, development and innovation. Collaboration with the Alexandra Institute can help to maintain a portfolio of more applied activities and, when it works well, make it easier for faculty members to maintain industry collaborations.

Many of our faculty members and students are interested in innovation and in starting up new companies. The department does not have resources on our own to create a full-fledged incubator environment, but we wish to experiment with ways in which we can support our students and staff’s' entrepreneurial activities, in collaboration with related activities at the University or in the IT-City Katrinebjerg. Therefore, we have recently created an experimental innovation lab, called Hatchit Lab, and one of our goals is to support the entrepreneurial activities of our students and recent graduates.