Yep. I'm not sure about Meiji Japan, but both the tiger economies and the Soviets did it by building on the existing European industrial economies. In the tiger's case, they bought easy to operate industrial machinery and ran it with cheap domestic labour for profitable export back to advanced economies, in Stalin's case he hired American contractors to build and train replica American factories in the USSR. After that, they could take the new resources and institutional experience and use it to build up to a next step.