I agree with Phillips’s assessment. In a similar vein, I read Ernest Boyer who identifies four domains of scholarship in university teaching and research: a scholarship of discovery, a scholarship of integration (or synthesis), a scholarship of application and a scholarship of teaching.

Current research practices disproportionately favour the scholarship of discovery (meanwhile the bean counters really like scholarships of applications). The scholarship of integration and synthesis rarely gets a look in.

I think this is also true for innovation outside of academia. There’s gold in them there hills.