Descrizione del progetto
Innovazione e la nascita della potenza industriale giapponese
Nel XIX secolo, il Giappone è stato l’unico paese asiatico ad avere industrializzato con successo la propria economia. Si ritiene che il periodo tra il 1800 e il 1885 sia stato di fondamentale importanza per lo sviluppo tecnologico del paese che lo ha trasformato da un’economia agricola a una industriale moderna. Tuttavia, questo periodo di transizione non è stato interamente compreso in modo empirico. Il progetto J-INNOVATECH, finanziato dall’UE, sfiderà la comprensione esistente sulla nascita del Giappone come una potenza industriale globale e metterà in discussione il ruolo dell’innovazione. Il lavoro in tale iniziativa Beyond Eureka unirà la tecnologia con lo studio di archivi inesplorati per approfondire il processo di industrializzazione giapponese. Il progetto esaminerà la transizione tecnologica a livello storico per sfidare il concetto di innovazione come una questione di alterazione. J-INNOVATECH mira a proporre l’innovazione come un processo di lungo termine di accumulo nel quale il nuovo deriva dal vecchio.
Obiettivo
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.
Parole chiave
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-STG - Starting GrantIstituzione ospitante
75794 Paris
Francia