Comment by candu

Well, yeah. That's why we have "research & development" as a term.

What you're referring to is the "development" part of that. In some sense: the job you have _exists precisely because it's not part of the research phase_, and it's equally as valuable as the research part. Research is the proof of concept; development is scaling up and making production-ready and finding small efficiencies and so on.

From an industry perspective, it's tempting to conflate these, because that's what industry research labs are designed to do: integrated R&D. But that is not at all how academic research labs work.