Adoption and diffusion of technological innovation in the United States and Japanese steel industries

The United States has lagged behind Japan in the steel industry in both technology adoption and exploitation for the last decades. While the Japanese steel producers did not invent the new technology, their strength has been to be extraordinarily quick to use it to replace older technologies and to be very effective at working out any bugs associated with it.; This research explains major differences in the steel industry in the United States and Japan, focusing on inter-organizational conditions—“technological environment sets”—in technology adoption and diffusion. One of the key reasons the Japanese have done so well in collecting and diffusing information is because they had an excellent multi-channel system to monitor foreign technological developments. In Japan, competitors within the industry, technology suppliers, government, technical education and training institution, and industry agencies and associations played important roles in this system. Through these mechanisms the Japanese more than compensated for the U.S. advantages.; The Japanese continue to use this system even though Japan's steel industry is now regarded as being the world's most technologically advanced. This gives Japan's steel industry important advantages in maintaining its technological lead. Once the technology was introduced in Japan, the internal “technological environment sets” of organizations were highly efficient in solving problems to adapt it.; We also found that the laggardness and/or reactiveness in the adoption and implementation of radical new technologies of U.S. integrated steel producers was the primary reason for losing their competitiveness domestically. The descriptive comparisons of the pattern of U.S. integrated steelmakers' adoption of radical technological innovations such as Electric Furnace and Continuous Casting to that of minimills show that U.S. integrated steelmakers were investing more slowly and more reactively to radical technology.; Collectively, these strategic inter-organizational and behavioral differences explain the very different evolution of the steel industry in the United States and Japan.