In academia, one approach to research can often be starting a wide variety of projects that all interest you, seeing what has traction. Depending on what interests you the most or what is the most convenient (or needed) project, that project is the one that gets the most traction. It is all up to you as the researcher to define the timeline. In industry however, it’s a bit flipped. As mentioned in Dr. Simon’s slides, you are given the project, not a bunch of projects that you might be interested in and it is done on the timeline of the company, at the direction/interests of the company; it does not really matter if you are really passionate or want the project gets done. As far as the company is concerned, it needs to get done. Going along with passion, in academia, if you wanted to focus on one specific area for your whole career and do nothing else but focus on that one specific thing, then you could do that, assuming you could fund yourself to do that. However, in industry that is not very efficient, so it is preferred that you research/develop something to the extent that the company needs it. If more focus is needed on the topic, it better be for a good reason (company need, potential failure, etc), because time is money, literally in this context.