I agree with you, and I don't want my comment to be read as an indictment of academia exactly - we couldn't live without it, it has huge returns on investment, etc. It's worth reading 10 bad papers to find 1 with a kernel of a good idea (and worth spending research funding on 100 bad experiments to get 1 useful result).

I think what I mean to say is that the skills required in industrial research (which can be quite speculative in well-funded companies, by which I mean a 5% chance of success or so) are somewhat different from those required in academia.