How Americans view the British

[I_am_not_mafia]

My view is quite opposite. The Americans will try and sell whatever they can before it even works so they can easily lie about how innovative they are. Whereas the Brits can be extremely innovative, they do things on the cheap which can take longer but are really, really crap at selling whatever they produce. The Americans normally buy up whatever we innovate and then sell it as their own.

The Germans on the other hand make the best engineers but this makes them less good at innovation.

That may be true for a fair amount of enterprises, but I worked as an engineer for many years and if we sold shit to the gov, we burned. There was generally a government quality assurance presence that aided in ensuring we made a product that performed as required. Anything I worked on certainly did work as contracted, and in many cases exceeded the requirements.

Yeah it's probably quite different for the military. The one time I worked in company selling software to the MOD we developed a pile of shit (which included cartoon icons and comic sans in the GUI).

My career has mainly focused on R&D in industry, particularly with start-ups.

Although if we're talking about innovation, Scotland basically invented the modern world.

Not that Scotland should be considered part of Britain ...