Last month, Siemens opened the first building complex of the Siemens Technology Centre (STC) at the Garching Research Campus, north of Munich, and part of the Technical University of Munich (TUM). In addition to Siemens, other institutions located there include the Max Planck Institute, and SAP; and with around 28,000 people working at this hub, the Garching Research Campus is one of the largest centres for science, research, and teaching in all of Europe.

Peter Körte, Siemens AG’s chief technology and chief strategy officer, said: “No one can solve the current challenges alone. We must accelerate collaboration with our customers and partners in the early stages of development. The Siemens Technology Centre — located on the same campus with TUM, international research institutions and companies — benefits from an excellent environment and will help strengthen Germany’s global role in cutting-edge research.”

Thomas Hofmann, president of the Technical University of Munich, added: “The collaboration between Siemens and TUM as part of the Industry on Campus strategy shows how a leading industrial partnership can bridge the gap between academic excellence and industrial innovation to work together on the challenges of our time and develop powerful disruptive solutions.”

Future technologies
Siemens will bundle all its corporate research activities in Germany at the STC. In the first phase, around 450 Siemens people will work on future technologies in collaboration with 150 scientists from the Technical University of Munich. The plan is to open a second building complex in 2027 with more than 630 Siemens Technology researchers and IP specialists. The STC will then be the largest of the total of about 12 central Siemens research hubs worldwide, with an investment of more than 100 million euros in total.

Data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) will be used at the STC, specifically to facilitate programming, detect production breakdowns at an early stage and enable natural language communication between humans and machines. With around 3,700 AI patents, Siemens plays a leading role in the field of AI.

Siemens’ spending on research and development rose by around 600 million euros to about 6.2 billion euros in fiscal 2023, strengthening the company’s ‘leading position in its core technologies that all come together on the open digital business platform Siemens Xcelerator. These technologies help develop, manufacture and operate industrial products more efficiently and sustainably’.