The example of the micromachine industry in the last chapter suggests that even the youngest of Japanese industries tend to be fully coordinated through intra-industry loops. The likely reasons for the rapid spread of coordination to and through these new-born industries are several. One is the transfer of institutional templates (cf. Nelson and Winter 1982) from other industries. Most Japanese firms in infant industries are not start-up ventures but well-established large diversified enterprises embedded in the coordination structure of the other industries in which they are active. Having developed routines and formed expectations around coordination as a common practice, they are unlikely to deviate from coordination practices when entering new industries.

Second, the government helps erect the support structure for networking and thus aids the development of coordination. One main avenue is the creation of an industry association once an industry comes into being. This pattern is clearly evident in both the semiconductor equipment and micromachine industries, in which the government was instrumental in setting up the Semiconductor Equipment Association of Japan and the Micromachine Center. The fact that the semiconductor equipment industry petitioned METI for the creation of an association underlines that this practice is generally welcomed by firms. That these associations then aid in intra-industry coordination is clearly evident from the evidence in Chapter 5 as well as prior work on industry associations (e.g., Schaede 2000; Tilton 1996).