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Lord Weinstock also said "we do not innovate", in getting Marconi out of the semiconductor business, something my granddad (from the Elliott Automation side of the house) never let a day go by without quoting:-)

also I'd point out that historically even if the Ruhrgebiet or Korean shipbuilding didn't have a cringey slogan, they most definitely did have a conscious and explicit focus on export-led growth, to the detriment of other priorities. German industrialists saw exporting both as an opportunity and as a hedge against potential, then real, political conflict at home starting in the 1880s at least (the "exportventile" or export safety valve) and have never stopped. Similarly, if you open a textbook to the page marked "export-led growth" in the index you'll find a Korean case study, it's extremely well known that they set out to export a ton of tankers (not as if there was a huge, or any, home market).

The Valley is different because of being joined at the hip to the DOD and cold war big science, but there's probably an interesting story about the transition from being suppliers to IBM projects for the Feds to global exporting.

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