The CC model as organizational design striving to combine relevance and rigor

This paper addresses the design problem of ensuring engaged research's rigorous relevance and, especially, its implications regarding the engaged researcher's role. As a theoretical background, this paper firstly uses the "role concept" from the Business Engineering discipline where "role" is a fundamental element of generic method description. Secondly, it uses the "Design Science" paradigm's generic guidelines for the assessment of research activities and results to ensure that they meet both the rigor and relevance criteria. Based on these theories, the paper finally describes and discusses a collaborative research mode of practitioners and academics called the "Competence Center Model" (CC model). This model is a useful case to study what researchers actually do when they strive to combine rigor and relevance. With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to discuss this research practice's effectiveness and its implied benefits for and strains on the researcher's role.