Just look at the difference between the civilization of 18th-century Europe, and especially Britain which spearheaded the Industrial Revolution, and the civilization of 18th-century China, which not only did not invent industry but didn't even adopt it after its foreign invention.
There were so many differences. Europe had more wealth and especially the investment capital necessary to build a massive industrial infrastructure. European philosophy was built around the individual and focused on a hopeful future, whereas Chinese philosophy was built around the family and focused on a glorious past. Europe had just had a Reformation, Renaissance and Enlightenment; there are many parts of the world where these have still not occurred. England in particular had a movement that reformed agricultural efficiency, freeing up a huge segment of the population to staff industrial processes; China was dependent on family farmers.
Particular inventions facilitated the invention of industry, particularly the clock which made synchronization of large processes possible and the steam engine which unlocked the chemical energy in fossil fuels. The Chinese were simply not inventors and did not even have a patenting system to reward and encourage the few they had; the Chinese invented printing, but never the printing press that was arguably the prototoype for the entire concept of mass production.
Now look back with this perspective on the Europe of the Greco-Roman era, and imagine how many major adjustments would have to be made to that society for the system of innovations that comprised the Industrial Revolution to arise. A major issue that doesn't even show up in the England-China comparison is that Classical Europe was a slave economy; a huge percentage of the population lived in squalor and toiled for the enrichment of others. We now know that this is a system of self-limiting prosperity that cannot produce the large surplus needed to fund a Paradigm Shift from agrarianism to industry. The now-obvious inevitable downfall of the American South, with or without the Civil War, testifies to this fundamental truth about work and workers.
So the interesting question is not how Europe would have changed if the Industrial Revolution had occurred earlier. The question is how it would have had to have changed first, before it could even have happened!