For sure. I think people can spend a lot of energy trying to protect their idea, and almost no energy in establishing if there is any prior work. I think this

For sure. I think people can spend a lot of energy trying to protect their idea, and almost no energy in establishing if there is any prior work. I think this comes from two main places: 1) A desire to believe we are special in our insight into the problem. 2) (lesser) A lack of general awareness that knowing the prior work in a domain is insanely useful. 3) A lack of search knowhow when it comes to finding similar ideas to one's own. This of course is aided when you have a good general understanding of the domains your idea touches, because you have the power of a search vocabulary. If you can stand on someone else's failures and efforts, and reap the benefits of their (explicit or just effectively) research, why would you not spend the short amount of time digesting that, before reinventing the wheel? "If I have seen further it is by standing on the sholders [sic] of Giants." - Isaac Newton