Since years software development industry is trying hard to show a remarkable performance in its project development work. Issues related to the software processes improvement, risk management, people's factors and effective project management still exist. Though academic researchers have produced good quality work on software industry issues, but unluckily, software industry could not get benefit of it as was being expected. Software engineering research work also seems unable to identify and understand the real industry problems and providing hands on solutions. The gap between researchers and actual industry practitioners is the sole reason behind it. It is the foremost need to learn from the academic research work and experiences of real software development industry practitioners. The objective of this study is to bridge this gap by highlighting the root causes of differences between software engineering research works and actual industry practices. An analysis of real industry projects, academic projects, research publications, and industry people is made to complete this research work. The outcome of this research is twofold. First, the identification of factors behind the academic-industry gap; second, presenting a set of measures to bridge this gap to produce actual industry based research works. © 2011 IEEE.