It is de rigueur for any company to be talking about the metaverse these days, but for German engineering firm Siemens, it is becoming something of a crusade. Following up on its announcement of a collaboration with Nvidia in June this year to “enable the industrial metaverse”, Siemens now seems to have gone all-in.

“We don’t claim that we know what the metaverse is, but we have an idea of what it could be and we want to shape it,” says Peter Korte, chief technology and strategy officer at Siemens, speaking from the company’s Siemensstadt industrial complex in Berlin.

Korte is a slick operator and he is smart. He knows that if Siemens can plant a flag in this space early enough, it will only add to the business’s own transformation plan to become a more digital, software platform-driven engineering firm.

Now you don’t get to be a company that celebrates its 175th birthday without knowing a thing or two about pivoting and smelling what is selling. Siemens celebrated this milestone in Berlin recently, with a dinner in Siemensstadt. Among the speakers was German chancellor Olaf Scholz, who said Siemens had “electrified, moved, united and constantly reinvented the world” – and here it is again, up to its old reinvention tricks.

“We believe digital twins are the building blocks for the metaverse,” says Korte, adding that it’s “all about making it real”.