A hundred-year-old who ensures standards: 100 years of DIN

It all began in 1917 with a standard for taper pins, a conical pin used as a connecting element in mechanical engineering. Currently, there are nearly 40,000 DIN standards in Germany. The most famous is certainly still the well-known DIN A4 paper size. But these simple standards have been supplemented by increasingly complex standards to meet the higher complexity in science, technology, and industry. Many products now consist of several thousand components, which are no longer produced by a single company but by hundreds of component and system manufacturers within global value chains. This can only succeed if compatibility and interoperability are ensured through appropriate standards.

The next challenge is digitalization in general and Industry 4.0 in particular, where the real and virtual factories and digital products must be connected and coordinated through standards. Furthermore, standards must not only meet technical or economic challenges but also environmental protection and the social dimensions of sustainability. Therefore, closer cooperation between standardization and science has become necessary. To meet this requirement, the German Institute for Standardization (DIN) signed a cooperation agreement with TU Berlin in 2008. The goal is to strengthen collaboration in research and education. The Department of Innovation Economics at TU Berlin, led by Prof. Dr. Knut Blind, has been offering lectures on standardization for over ten years, supported actively by DIN, enriched by guest speakers from industry and other interested circles, as well as visits to standardization meetings at DIN. In research, DIN established the German Standardization Panel in 2012, conducted by the TU department, which serves as a source for numerous research projects.

"We are glad to have already shared part of the 100 years together with DIN and look forward to many more years of collaboration to support standardization with well-trained graduates and interesting research work. Congratulations!"