Technology and Industrial Development in Japan: Building Capabilities by Learning, Innovation and Public Policy

Japan was the first major non-western nation to take on board the Western technological and organizational advances of the century after the first industrial revolution. It subsequently proved fully able to exploit and contribute to the broad, sustained technological advances that began in the twentieth century, as science became harnessed to technology. Japan’s economic development remains a model for many technologically less advanced countries which have not yet mastered modern technology to organizational forms; and a knowledge of Japanese technological and economic history can contribute importantly to our understanding of economic growth in the modern era.