Software engineering community has widely recognized the need for more empirical work due to “advocacy research". New methods and tools have been proposed to industry without providing solid empirical evidence to support the claimed benefits. In addition to this need, we suggest new opportunities for empirical research in software engineering and ICT research in general. We propose the Experimental and Explorative Research (EER) strategy to address (1) tool development in software engineering research, and more importantly, (2) application and service development in other ICT areas like research in mobile applications and services. These kinds of projects provide a much more realistic environment for experimentation than traditional student projects, yet they can be controlled much more easily than pure industry projects.