Academia & Industry: Pursuits of Novelty vs. Finessing through Reinventing-the-Wheel
Over the past few months, I came across a few PhD students who encountered ongoing projects in the industry and asked,
“This problem has been solved. Why is XXX reinventing the wheel?”
A few years ago, I would have had similar thoughts. After working for a while in the industry where I no longer do pure research, my perspective has changed.
What is “solved”?
The definition of “solved problem” in academia is different from the industry. Solutions in academic publications usually work well under a few assumptions. These assumptions were carefully chosen to make sure the scope covers the common cases while avoiding the rare edge cases (a.k.a. leaving them for future work). Roughly we can say that it works for 90% of the time. The publication systems also give little incentive for researchers to work on the remaining 10%. Oftentimes, paper submissions are rejected due to “incremental” contributions. Also, one of the PhD students’ worst nightmares is learning that somebody just publish something close to their dear dissertation topic. Therefore, researchers tend to focus more on looking for new frontiers and exploring new open areas that can be fully claimed, viewing the explored areas as “solved”.
