INSO – Industrial Software

History of INSO

The Science, Research & Innovation House INSO Industrial Software is an academic institute founded by Univ. Prof. DI Dr. Thomas Grechenig, formally organized as a company in the sense of a research society. It advances scientific, research, and academic teaching activities in the field of digitalization and makes them available for various collaborations worldwide. Its purpose is to understand and then create the robust continuity of ideas and pilots at one end of innovation to the industrially real effect at the other end. This includes the ability to realize fair protection of inventive achievements and to appropriately reflect the long-term investment model of RISE / INSO for partners.

Moreover, it is possible to broaden the practically proven RISE innovation model by returning a portion of the sustainable economic revenue from investment and goodwill-intensive research projects, which have been successfully placed on the market after 7–15 years, back to the academy. INSO is currently expanding this modern form of “Industrial Liaison in the 21st Century” beyond Europe and will extend it within this decade to the integrative engineering science format SISSI (The Science for Industrial Systems & Software Institute).

INSO leads, produces, researches, guides, lives partnerships, accompanies individual projects, and strategic cooperations in this “Science for Industry” connecting activity:

• Methodologically overarching and condensing,
• Professionally integrative and synergistic,
• Industrially understanding and adaptable,
• Epistemologically usage- and user-centered.

INSO naturally sees itself as a bridge builder to various disciplines that have historically had average experiences with the adoption of digitalization benefits. For example, the question of whether digital identity theft is more of a classic fraud or so “technical” that crime takes on completely new forms and should therefore be pursued technically first, led worldwide to two completely different personalization strategies, neither of which has made federal criminal offices more effective.

INSO sees it as a methodological deficit of digitalization sciences that such planning misunderstandings are avoidable through honest professional transparency. Since the scientific approach associated with and attributed to INSO should ultimately result in a contribution to genuine digital systems that is beneficial to humanity and society, the School of INSO locates itself in three complementary orientations and manifestations:

1. Innovator and explorer in the digital individual subject (the entire modern spectrum of information and communication technology, including, for example, software engineering, IT security, AI as a technology, etc.)
2. Loyal advisor and implementer for “non-digital” subjects that increasingly require digital systems or are exposed to this impetus (medicine, law, economics, financial theory, the fine arts, literature, ...)
3. Loyal partner and translator of the respective technological feasibilities for the other natural sciences and/or engineering disciplines such as chemistry, geology, physics, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, energy and electrical engineering, with whom, non-dominantly, task-appropriately, a comprehensive “systems engineering” is maintained, which helps to sort existing state-of-the-art into leading or bleeding-edge so that the best result can arise depending on the state of research, budget, or other scarce resources. An example: The future of systems engineering knows mechanical engineering, which is dominantly mechanical and needs digital in defined doses (e.g., combustion engine). But also that where this turns into a completely mirrored relationship (Cloud of Cars).

The research groups of INSO at various universities are instances and manifestations of INSO that have developed from the research tradition of Prof. Grechenig and his group. It is not important for the group to make their label visible everywhere. It is about scientific cooperation. The group has been financed for more than 20 years by revenues from RISE. INSO deals, for example, at the TU Vienna with the research of the development and maintenance of software systems in practice. Particular focus is on the 4Ps, the topics of large IT projects, organizational and industrial processes, digital products, and the people in systems & software engineering, who “deliver” in different roles and teams. The central method is the empirical approach: the investigation and observation of engineering and industrial projects.

The USP of the group consists in the perspectives and the different lenses & sensors on the de facto operational doing, e.g., in large projects or digital leading-edge topics. The field of modern information technology was so successful and strongly growing in the last 4 decades that real honest empiricism could hardly find its way into the sciences of the discipline and thus the transformation to genuine engineering science is just beginning.

INSO resides at many universities in different groupings, focus formations, and cooperations. It will strategically expand these in the coming 15 years. INSO has 40 years of experience in many areas of digitalization through concrete systems engineering. Numerous studies and scientific works (> 600) on various questions in the field of digitalization of official processes, health, monetary economy, IoT, IT security, interactive systems, traffic infrastructure, geographic information systems, and much more have been conducted in the context of the subject area presented here. These results have led in the past decades to more than 400 relevant conference and journal publications.

It is in the nature of the growth of RISE and INSO that this is only one fifth of the number of publications that would have been possible based on the available knowledge of the researchers and the experiences. INSO publishes when it is personally opportune or strategically makes sense. Less often does INSO publish for purely academic self-purpose.

INSO has a large, scientifically and industrially very experienced staff, who bring both the highest technical and professional expertise (can quickly integrate, in addition to software development, analysis, and computer science experts, also professionally qualified personnel from other engineering disciplines in the sense of the study) as well as the necessary methodological skills, e.g., in the field of requirements engineering and analyses, to work on feasibility studies for contractors with high quality: Science & Technology at the state of the art.