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The other thing you got in the 80s was a lot of cargo-culting of Japanese industrial planning practices. People like Lester Thurow (Nobel Prize in Economics) went around telling anyone who would listen that we needed large-scale government/industry partnerships like MITI if we weren't going to fall even further behind. Sematech was one outcome in the US around semiconductors. (It's still around but never had much impact.

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Thank you for spurring a search engine trip to this interesting article about Sematech https://www.technologyreview.com/s/424786/lessons-from-semat...

That is interesting. That article sounds a much more positive note than what I recollected. I was admittedly on the periphery of the semiconductor space but I never heard much about them after the initial splash.

There is a really good book on the US reaction: “R&D Collaboration on Trial”[0].

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Collaboration-Trial-Microelectronics-...

Interestingly, it's happening today on a fairly large scale in software--through open source. Open source has removed a lot of the barriers to cooperation because it can happen at least somewhat informally without a lot of the traditional legal and IP paperwork associated with consortia.

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