Description du projet
L’innovation et l’émergence de la puissance industrielle japonaise
Au 19e siècle, le Japon a été le seul pays asiatique à réussir l’industrialisation de son économie. La période comprise entre les années 1800 et 1885 est considérée comme déterminante dans le développement technologique du pays, qui est passé d’une économie agraire à une économie industrielle moderne. Cette période de transition n’est toutefois pas entièrement comprise de manière empirique. Le projet J-INNOVATECH, financé par l’UE, remettra en cause la vision actuelle de l’émergence du Japon en tant que puissance industrielle mondiale et s’interrogera sur le rôle de l’innovation. Les travaux envisagés dans le cadre de cette initiative Beyond Eureka associeront la technologie à l’étude d’archives inexploitées, afin d’analyser le processus de l’industrialisation japonaise. Le projet examinera la transition technologique d’un point de vue historique avec pour objectif de remettre en question la notion d’innovation en tant que bouleversement. J-INNOVATECH entend présenter l’innovation comme un processus d’accumulation à long terme par lequel le neuf résulte de l’ancien.
Objectif
Beyond Eureka seeks to challenge current understanding of how Japan became a global industrial power along with the model of how innovation takes place. Japan was the first Asian nation to industrialize and in a space of several decades went from a relatively isolated agrarian economy to an industrialized nation. The key assumption of this project is that a grasp of the salient features of the technological landscape during the pivotal period between 1800 and 1885 is an important tool for understanding Japan's industrialization. To date, this transitional period has been widely acknowledged as crucial for later development but remains empirically poorly understood. Recognizing the complexity of causation, this project seeks to use technology as a site for forging a more nuanced understanding of the emergence of Asia's first industrial power.
By bringing technological change into historical focus, the project challenges the notion of innovation as necessarily a matter of disruption. In Japanese, for example, there is no conceptual or cultural equivalent to Eureka, to stand for a unique, distinct moment of individual ingenuity. If we choose the Eureka moment to epitomize the conception of innovation, early examples in Japanese industry are few and far between. Instead, a small but growing body of research shows that a sophisticated and patient examination of archives can reveal innovative processes in place of what historiography has described as borrowing, imitation or adaptation. This project seeks to foreground innovation as a long-term process of accumulation in which the new only could only work by taking root and embedding itself within the old, not by replacing it and starting from scratch.
The team, comprising the PI and five postdoctoral fellows, will combine expertise and previously unexamined archives to bring depth and nuance to not only to the specific case of Japanese industrialization, but also more
broadly of innovative processes in human past.
Champ scientifique
Mots‑clés
Programme(s)
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitution d’accueil
75794 Paris
France