The academic/business split is weird. In business, you're much more likely to be unknowingly treading on known ground, but the visibility of lessons learned is, in most cases, incredibly narrow. I've worked on compilers blindly implementing features I know other competitors have worked on but can't cheat off of, and I've worked on systems programming issues that probably pushed at the state of the art, but whose lessons wouldn't go outside my team in any case.
In academia, though, there's a whole host of obstacles to doing anything useful and interesting that have nothing to do with "the problem at hand". So while you can be more confident in the relative novelty of what you're doing, as well as the broad applicability of said work (since the whole point is publishing) the scope of things you actually can work on is incredibly limited until late in your career.
In academia, though, there's a whole host of obstacles to doing anything useful and interesting that have nothing to do with "the problem at hand". So while you can be more confident in the relative novelty of what you're doing, as well as the broad applicability of said work (since the whole point is publishing) the scope of things you actually can work on is incredibly limited until late in your career.