Building STP’s Ecosystem: Kitakyushu Approach - Technopolis: Best Practices for Science and Technology Cities - page 396

Table 1 Characteristics of British national system of innovation, eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries
• Strong links between scientists and entrepreneurs
• Science has become a national institution, encouraged by the state and popularized by local
clubs
• Strong local investment by landlords in transport infrastructure (canals and roads, later
railways)
• Partnership form of organization enables inventors to raise capital and collaborate with
entrepreneurs (e.g., Arkwright/Strutt)
• Profits from trade and services available through national and local capital markets to invest in
factory production especially in textiles
• Economic policy strongly influenced by classical economics and in the interests of
industrialization
• Strong efforts to protect national technology delay catching up by competitors
• British productivity per person about twice as high as European average by 1850
• Reduction or elimination of internal and external barriers to trade
• Dissenters' academies and some universities provide science education. Mechanics trained in
new industrial towns on part-time basis
Source Freeman and Soete ( 1997 , p. 296)

Table 2 Characteristics of US national system of innovation, late nineteenth and twentieth

centuries
• No feudal barriers to trade and investment; slavery abolished 1865; capitalist ideology
dominant
• Railway infrastructure permits rapid growth of very large national market from the 1860s
onwards
• Shortage of skilled labor induces development of machine intensive and capital intensive
techniques (McCormick, Singer, Ford)
• Abundant national resources exploited with heavy investment and big scale economies (steel,
copper, oil)
• Mass production and flow production as typical US techniques
• Strong encouragement of technical education and science at federal and state level from 1776
onwards
• US firms in capital intensive industries grow very large (GM, GE, SO, etc.) and start inhouse
R&D
• US productivity twice as high as Europe by 1914
• Major import of technology and science through immigration from Europe
Source Freeman and Soete ( 1997 , p. 296)

end of the production run but at every stage. 2 It affected especially the charac-
teristic R&D strategy of the major Japanese companies and their staffs. Japanese
engineers and managers grew accustomed to the idea of 'using the factory as a
laboratory'. 3

The work of the R&D department was very closely related to the

2

Freeman and Soete, Ibid., pp. 150-151.

3

Baba, Ibid.