The growth started in the 14th. It was awhile before the industry happened, but the change in growth rate is strongly connected with the Black Plague.

One of the many, many descriptions of this is here (many because this is the mainstream theory): https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/black-death-and-industrialisa...

The first technology wasn't the steam engine, it was eating beef instead of just grain, and having cattle pull plows. We don't think of that as a huge technological revolution, but it was a dramatic efficiency gain at the time. It wasn't a new invention, but there wasn't enough surplus to deploy it widely before that.

You might regard the Renaissance as the prelude to the industrial revolution.

Lots of serious historians disagree. There are whole books on the topic. Here's just one paper as an example

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-demograph...

Societal changes are slow beasts, they may very well take several centuries to develop. Nation-states were a direct consequence of the printing press, yet they didn't arrive until XIX century.