The example of Japan gives good hints at what may be the real reasons why India does not adopt innovation as quickly and has trouble with standardization — it lacks a strong central authority and, related to this, a strong sense of national will.

Japan did not allow ideas to come in unfiltered by the west. The elite bureaucrats aggressively sought ideas, but carefully chose those that were most useful and then, critically, organized the adoption of these ideas quickly and in a wholesale fashion. The organizing principle was what was good for the nation-state, and the primary aim was to grow strong enough to avoid the very real threat of colonization. With this end, the governing elite also took an active role in fostering (and favoring) the industries it deemed important to building national strength. It did so by promoting a high savings rate (taxation, promotion of cartels to keep prices up, etc.) and redirecting these funds to favored industries.

In short, Japan developed through a quasi-fascist command economy. Though ignored because of its distasteful political overtones, fascism is a very powerful economic model, the rapid increase in economic power of Italy and Germany before and during the war are two obvious cases in point. Less obvious is the quasi-fascism of the United States during the Civil War and WWII, periods of rapid industrialization and technological innovation.