Digitalization is one of the most powerful and profound developments that industry has ever experienced. With digital technologies such as software, data, and artificial intelligence (AI), companies in the software-intensive systems domain are facing a rapid transformation of their traditional businesses and a fundamental shift in how systems are built, deployed and continuously improved. To accelerate this transformation, and with a vision to significantly improve the digitalization capability of the European software-intensive systems industry, Software Center was established in 2011. Since then 15 companies and five Swedish universities have worked closely together to explore opportunities, identify challenges, develop solutions and validate these in real-world settings. This talk focuses on the unique collaboration model that has enabled companies and researchers to combine industrial impact and academic excellence for more than a decade. It details the collaboration format, the win-wins for everyone involved and the multiple mechanisms that allow researchers to not only solve problems - but to solve real problems, hard problems and those problems that are considered top priority by the industry partners.