ABSTRACT
Innovation is not synonymous with technology per se. Irrespective of how a firm might develop an advanced technology, the technology will not constitute an innovation if there is no organizational system that harnesses the technology as it does the organization. In other words, technology in itself is not meaningful for an organization; the organizational contexts in which technology is used should be accorded far greater importance. Industrial innovation in Japanese firms will in due course be useful under Japanese organizational contexts. According to Clark and Newell (1993), for instance, materials requirements planning (MRP) and manufacture resource planning (MRPII) are adopted to a considerably lesser extent in Japanese factories than by their British counterparts, which may indicate that variants of these technologies have existed, albeit with different societal embedding of these technologies in each country. A successful industrial innovation thus occurs under the influence of the national cultural contexts in which the firm is located.
