This made me chuckle. I hear it again and again with regard to British innovation and entrepreneurship to the degree that it's almost a cliche, but would be interested to know if there's anything solid behind the idea (and that's not a snarky 'sources?' comment BTW, just genuinely interested to know if this supposed phenomenon has been substantiated). Is it just the case that circumstances conspired against the UK? Is there something in the culture that led the UK to give up too easily in favour of easy money elsewhere? Was the UK deliberately undermined by e.g. the US (Black Arrow, TSR2)?
A lot of this needs to be seen in the context of post-imperial decline, and (in the 70s at least) serious financial difficulties. We could probably have made some of TSR2, Black Arrow, Magnox, APT, Concorde, Trident/Polaris, etc big successes with adequate funding, but we could never have done all of them. It looks like Concorde was one of the ones that was chosen to be funded to completion, partly due to the personal intervention of Tony Benn.
(Possible counterexample: the three V-bombers)
A lot of things were funded to the first failure but not to the first success. A common problem - NASA would never have been able to do what SpaceX did because the funding would have been pulled on the first failed landing, despite this being an anticipated part of the development plan.
In the private sector, any history of this would have to cover the class system and industrial action. Also CP Snow's "Two Cultures".
I would probably also list the UK's small mindedness towards immigration; the US was a magnet for fleeing scientists and intellectual refugees after the war. Much of SV's success is due to immigration or internal migration: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/30/us-tech-companies-founded-by...
The short answer is that the UK government from 1979 to 1997 was pretty hostile towards the entire idea, with the exception of a few specific pet projects like the BBC micro, and subsequent governments were lukewarm.
Some the projects were brilliant engineering but commercially never stood a chance like Concorde; other projects like the amalgamation of struggling private car companies as a part-nationalised state one were renowned for the sort of mediocrity and mismanagement that made privatisation and abandonment of industrial subsidies politically fashionable, even independently from those approaches helping pay for tax cuts.
The BBC Micro is arguably an outstandingly successful pivot instead. Promoting computer lessons at schools might have been a huge success in encouraging more parents to buy PCs, but parents bought commodity hardware running Windows/DOS, and after that it became natural for schools to shift towards purchasing the same thing with connectivity to the newfangled world wide web rather than Acorn's specialised systems providing educational wordprocessors with speech synthesis that ran on a floppy disk. Even without that trend, specialised hardware/software products specific for the UK educational market was never an ideal niche to be in anyway, whereas licensing ARM chips turned out to be a very lucrative and long term business for one of Acorn's subsidiaries instead.
This made me chuckle. I hear it again and again with regard to British innovation and entrepreneurship to the degree that it's almost a cliche, but would be interested to know if there's anything solid behind the idea (and that's not a snarky 'sources?' comment BTW, just genuinely interested to know if this supposed phenomenon has been substantiated). Is it just the case that circumstances conspired against the UK? Is there something in the culture that led the UK to give up too easily in favour of easy money elsewhere? Was the UK deliberately undermined by e.g. the US (Black Arrow, TSR2)?