It is well known that industrial nations have one another as their biggest trading partners and that their exchange consists of a high proportion of manufactured goods. What is less commonly recognized is that technology is one of the key commodities they trade. Transfer of technology is especially intensive between partners of roughly similar levels of industrial development. New machines, new systems, and new ideas about their organization and deployment - elements of what is known as “international technological best practice” - tend to flow rapidly between highly industrialized countries, primarily through contact between particular individuals and their firms.

Applying this observation to the German-American situation following World War II might seem problematic, given West Germany's undeniable junior status in technology. Still, it is crucial to keep in mind that, despite the evident inequalities between them, West Germany and the United States had many technological and scientific capabilities in common after 1945, especially when compared to virtually any other country in the world.

Indeed, an interpretation of technology transfer in the postwar period based on notions of uniformly superior American technology and unidirectional transfer from the United States to West Germany would be wildly inaccurate, though such an interpretation is implicit in many economic histories of West Germany in the postwar period. The story of technology transfer between the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany is, in fact, much richer than that, and recent research indicates that it was central to the development of the postwar German-American relationship.