Technological Innovations and Inventors in Prewar Japan

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The aim of this paper is to study the link between technological innovations and inventors. There are two main features in this paper : one is by the comparison between traditional industry and modern industry, the other is to investigate not only through statistical analysis but also through case studies. As a result, activity of technological innovation and the type of innovator in the traditional industry differed from that of modern industry. The conclusions are as follows: (1) Whereas, inventors who were independent from organizations played major role in the early phase of economic development, the contribution of the inventors in organizations such as firms and institutions became greater in the latter. (2) The inventions in the traditional industry are mainly occasioned by "demand-pull". On the other hand, many "technology-push" inventions are discovered in the modern one. (3) It went almost well that the educational policy which tried to meet the manpower-demand growing by industrial development.