---
id: people/michael-grieves
about:
  label: Michael Grieves
  description: >-
    American product lifecycle management expert who introduced the idea of a
    digital twin of a physical product and later gave it its name in a book.
  tags:
    - digital twin
    - product lifecycle management
    - manufacturing
    - history
person:
  affiliation: Digital Twin Institute
  role: product lifecycle management expert
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: Michael Grieves (Wikipedia)
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Grieves'
    - title: >-
        Digital Twin: Manufacturing Excellence through Virtual Factory
        Replication (a white paper by Dr. Michael Grieves, 2014)
      url: >-
        https://www.3ds.com/fileadmin/PRODUCTS-SERVICES/DELMIA/PDF/Whitepaper/DELMIA-APRISO-Digital-Twin-Whitepaper.pdf
    - title: 'Michael Grieves, Executive Director, Digital Twin Institute (AIAA)'
      url: 'https://aiaa.org/people/michael-grieves/'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Michael Grieves works on product lifecycle management (PLM), the handling of a product's information from design to retirement.[^1] After a degree in computer engineering at Michigan State he took an MBA at Oakland University and then a doctorate at Case Western Reserve.[^1] He is executive director of the Digital Twin Institute, and was chief scientist of advanced manufacturing at the Florida Institute of Technology.[^1,3] AIAA's profile says he has consulted or done research for NASA, Boeing, Unilever, Newport News Shipbuilding and General Motors.[^3]

In his 2014 white paper he writes that he introduced the concept of a virtual, digital equivalent of a physical product in 2003, in his University of Michigan executive course on PLM.[^2] The name Digital Twin came later, in his book Virtually Perfect; he attributes it to John Vickers of NASA, a colleague.[^2] In his model the physical product sits in real space and the virtual product in virtual space, tied together by links of data and information.[^2] With Vickers he later wrote a chapter on the digital twin and unpredictable, undesirable emergent behaviour in complex systems.[^1]

The wiki's [history of the digital twin](/articles/history-of-the-digital-twin/) gives his account of where the term came from.