Studying and collaborating with any software-intensive organization demands for excellence in empirical software engineering research. The ever-growing complexity and context-dependency of software products, however, demands for more pragmatic and solution-focused research. This is a great opportunity but it also conflicts with the traditional quest for “purity” in research and a very narrow focus of the work. In this short positioning, we elaborate on challenges which emerge from academia-industry collaborations and discuss touch upon pragmatic ways of approaching them along the co-production model which emerged from SERL Sweden. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.