Siemens is moving its most important research location from Munich to Garching. The suburb of the state capital is increasingly becoming the Bavarian Silicon Valley.
Garching - Georg von Wichert apologizes as he gives a tour of the new Siemens laboratories in Garching. “It still looks like a bit of a mess here, but we’re still clearing things up,” says the engineer. The electrical engineer has previously conducted research at the Siemens site in Neuperlach in the far southeast of Munich; a few days ago he and his department moved to Garching in the Munich district.
The campus of the Technical University of Munich is located between the A9 in the west and the Isar in the east. Siemens has built a new building on the site and 450 employees will find a new home here in the coming weeks. A second building is planned, and a total of 1,000 employees are expected to work in the new “Siemens Technology Center” by 2027. Data analysis, artificial intelligence (AI), communication between humans and machines – Siemens is hoping for new products for its industrial customers.
Neuperlach is history
The move is still ongoing, but in the new Siemens laboratory a group of young engineers is already testing an industrial robot that will be able to pick and sort individual parts from boxes. What's special: The robot doesn't have to be laboriously programmed; thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), it can be controlled via voice command. “For fun, we once calculated that the robot has more combinations of possible movements than there are atoms on earth,” says Siemens researcher Georg von Wichert. And the likelihood that Georg von Wichert will soon stumble upon other researchers is also many times higher in Garching compared to Neuperlach. Siemens moves into offices on the first and third floors of the building, and another institution has set up shop on the second floor: the Technical University of Munich, or TUM for short.
“There have been close collaborations between TUM and Siemens for many years, for example in the field of robotics,” says Alin Albu-Schäffer, robotics professor at TUM. Alin Albu-Schäffer is one of 150 TUM scientists who will soon move into the new Siemens building - without paying rent, as a university spokesman explains: “The Free State of Bavaria provided the property, the industrial partner built the building , in return, TUM will use the space in the building free of charge for 50 years.”
Shared conference rooms and laboratories close to each other: This is how Siemens and TUM live next door
In practice, the cooperation looks like this: TUM and Siemens share the ground floor, there are common conference rooms, laboratories in the immediate vicinity, a café and a number of seating areas where researchers can open their laptops. The architecture is intended to promote exchange - also with the neighbors.
Another DAX heavyweight has set up shop right next to Siemens: the Walldorf-based software giant SAP. A few hundred meters further are the Max Planck and Fraunhofer Institutes. With 28,000 people, the research campus in Garching is one of the largest science centers in Europe - and Siemens is now right in the middle of it. Something has been created in Garching “that is unique and that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world,” says Siemens strategy boss Peter Körte
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In Neuperlach everything was a little more complicated: there have always been TU students who did an internship at Siemens, worked as a working student or wrote their bachelor's, master's or doctoral thesis at the company. “But you used to always have to take the subway from the TU in Garching to Perlach, but now everything is in one place,” says von Wichert.
Comparison with America's super location
The concentration of various institutions in one place is based on a prominent model: Silicon Valley in the US state of California. At the turn of the millennium, technology companies such as Google and Yahoo emerged around the Stanford University campus; the boundaries between academic and industrial research have long been blurred in the United States. “Even today, transfers between companies and universities in the USA are still somewhat faster than in Europe,” says robotics professor Alin Albu-Schäffer.
But is there a danger in too close proximity between state universities and private companies? In the Federal Republic, Article 5 of the Basic Law is intended to guarantee freedom of research and teaching. The President of the TU Munich, Thomas Hofmann, assures: “At TUM we work very closely and trustingly with hundreds of established companies and start-ups. The independence of research and teaching is never in danger because these collaborations are self-determined.” Unfortunately, in Germany it is common to “conjure up dangers” instead of seeing the opportunities. “No company or university will solve humanity’s great challenges alone,” he emphasizes.
Albu-Schäffer also does not believe that TU research is focusing too much on Siemens due to the geographical proximity. “Siemens is one of many options for us; the TU has not made any commitments to Siemens in terms of research.”
Free State promotes “Industry on Campus”
Especially since the cooperation between the private sector and state universities is a political will in order to be able to keep up with international competition. In 2019, the Bavarian state government decided on a high-tech agenda with an investment volume of two billion euros; cooperation between universities, companies and start-ups is an express goal. Regarding the collaboration between Siemens and TUM, Science Minister Markus Blume (CSU) says: The “Industry on Campus” concept is a “smart strategy”. Science policy is always economic and location policy.
The unions also welcome the development: “In principle, we support Siemens investing in Garching,” says Kai Winkler, Siemens representative at IG Metall Munich. The strategic cooperation between Siemens and the Technical University is also “extremely exciting,” he adds. “This is about an investment in the future from which the entire technology location of Munich should benefit.”
Today Siemens wants to officially open its “Technology Center” in Garching. If the managers' plans work, the technologies emerging here could revolutionize industrial production in just a few years.