MIT launches the International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP) — a five-year, $5 million research project comparing automotive production systems worldwide. Led by james-womack, daniel-jones, and Daniel Roos, the study systematically documented the performance gap between toyota-motor-corporation's production system and Western mass production. The IMVP team coined the term "lean production" to describe what Toyota did. The study's findings were published as the-machine-that-changed-the-world (1990), which became the foundational text of the global lean movement. The IMVP study was significant because it provided rigorous, data-driven evidence of TPS's superiority — not anecdotes or case studies but comprehensive benchmarking across the global auto industry.