Sjaak Brinkkemper is full professor Intelligent Software Systems at Utrecht University. He lectures on the topic of science-based entrepreneurship for students at the university, has worked in industry, and advises start-ups and scale-ups in the software industry.
Sjaak Brinkkemper's overall research theme is ‘’Software Production: methodology of requirements, architecting and entrepreneurship’’. In essence, it is about the implications of market conditions on software development methods and processes. He distinguishes main research lines:
- Continuous Architecting: development of new product releases comprises integral processes for requirements management, product architectures, functional and technical design, realization, testing, configuration management, deployment, and usage feedback. From a holistic perspective he aims to integrate all software artefacts into the architecture. Linguistic tools transform feature requirements (user stories) into a central domain specific ontology for the application knowledge base.
- Entrepreneurship in ecosystems: starting a software company is relatively easy, but continuing the enterprise in a solid sustainable manner is extremely difficult. Sjaak investigates decision making on software production: product road mapping, product/service duality, customer involvement, productization, and internationalization.
In 2023, he launched the university spin-off Verticai, which provides automated reporting of protocolised conversations for healthcare, municipalities and police.