ABSTRACT
United Plantations was not alone in moving into a new era of high profits and innovation after the Second World War. From the 1950s to the 1980s, as Malaysia’s oil palm acreage expanded, so too did the country’s role as a world centre of research and development. Few of the new ideas, plant breeding methods and machines that were now developed or put into use in Malaysia had actually been invented there. Yet with its increasingly evident political stability and economic prosperity, the country provided an ideal environment for the application and diffusion of inventions and for the investment which was vital for their transformation into practical and effective innovations.
