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Actually reading the article, explicitly none of those things.

Alternatively: if you are doing work that attempts to have industry relevance you should have some idea of what problems are actually relevant to industry. In particular, just because you think something is an interesting and challenging problem that just has to be affecting industry players does not mean it actually is. It may have been solved already, or you may have made some poor assumptions on conceiving the problem which, if corrected, make the problem disappear entirely (perhaps replaced by a different one that would've been a more valuable research target).

If you're trying to do forward-looking invent things that aren't even a twinkle in industry's eye yet, that's absolutely fine too, and the author explicitly calls out that the only important thing here is to recognize when your work isn't likely to be applicable in the near term. Nowhere does Matt state that this makes this sort of research less valuable, and honestly in many cases academia is the only place it can reasonably happen due to funding incentives.




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