This article focuses partly overlooked aspects regarding organisation and implementation of postgraduate education and more specifically, doctoral studies under collaborative projects with both research and development claims. The purpose of the article is that by the author's own experiences – both senior lecturers in education - contribute to increased knowledge of what it can mean to study for a doctorate in the field of educational science on these partly new conditions, and what implications it may have for the research and related scientific perspective which is thereby constituted. Previous research indicate that collaborative projects where different logics is to be integrated generally are held insolely positive and generative terms  (Danermark & Kullberg, 1999; Dahlstedt & Hertzberg, 2011; Öijen, 2013), while that type of complex arrangements may involve both challenges and possibilities when it comes to developing an independent and critical approach (Mendoza, 2010). The integration of different logics characterizing collaborative projects, and its partly dissimilar claims, will have significance for the research questions that will be asked and the results thus made possible.