University-industry collaboration is recognized as one of the crucial driving forces for innovation and economic prosperity. However, a number of barriers, like: different expectation from this collaboration; lack of mutual understanding, trust and commitment; having shared goals; different levels of flexibility; conflicts regarding royalty payments from patents or other intellectual property rights and concerns about confidentiality and others hinder seriously this collaboration. This paper presents the very first step of university initiated collaboration with industry which starts with the collection of problems from ordinary citizens of different countries with the aim to analyze them and identify opportunities for the creation of new valuable products and services for the further transfer of the solutions to industry. A bottom up cyclic collaboration process university-society-university-industry-society makes the conceptual base of this approach.