There aren't 2 different kinds of research, kind A that is never gonna go anywhere and kind B that is visionary. The vast majority of the advancement of knowledge has been what academia has always valued: probably never gonna go anywhere, but might push the envelope by an inch or a millimeter. The whole reason you have to research a thing is you don't know whether it's gonna go anywhere.

Which isn't how we think in industry, not even in industry R&D. We have to know it'll probably to go somewhere, or at least have a small chance of going really far. That's the only way to get a profit in expectation.

But work that will probably go nowhere or even if it does go somewhere, won't get very far, like most of scientific progress? The point of systems like tenure is to foster that, since industry can't.