Can Germany Beat the U.S. to the Industrial Internet?

For your job to be taken seriously in Germany, goes the joke, it should start with an “e-” and end in “-ngineering.” Yet German officials fret that for all their country’s hardware know-how, the economy is at risk in a world where software is king and factories are increasingly linked by the Internet. Worse, an effort to give German companies an edge in building the factories of the future is under threat from a similar initiative sponsored by U.S. tech companies.

“There’s great concern that a Google or an Apple might master the manufacturing world,” says Heinz-Jürgen Prokop, head of development at Trumpf, a family-owned maker of metalworking machinery that’s participating in a program called Industrie 4.0. “It’s important that we try to do it ourselves while we still have the opportunity.”