Alternate Starting Points for the Industrial Revolution

While I understand very well why the British Empire was the first to industrialize in OTL (e.g. rich coal deposits, a powerful marine, rather easy transport by ship, etc), I wonder if the Industrial Revolution could have started as well in some other country?
Also, would the bigger German States (Austria, Bavaria, Saxony, Prussia, probably Hannover) have had a chance to do so?
And what about Asia? Especially if China and Japan didn´t shut off their countries in the previous centuries? Or simply to a lesser extend?
 
I believe the Song (or was it the Tang) was fairly 'close' to going industrial around the turn of the second millennium, however I'm not sure what would allow them to push over the edge and truly start the process of industrialisation.
 
the current theory seems to be that the requirement for the IR was a high wage cost, low energy cost economy and the only place that met those conditions was England.
 
And since microbiology and antibiotics is just grinding lenses and growing things in petri dishes (with some luck along the way of course!) maybe biology could have been one of the earlier sciences instead of one of the later ones.

And if so, maybe medicine could have been a (40% ?) driver of the economy, in addition to the usual suspects of military, sailing, commerce, etc.

And this possibly could have happened in some interesting parts of the world.
 
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