Academia is obsessed with "novelty" which is a weaker form of originality. Very frequently there are ideas which are an obvious next step to everyone in the fie

Academia is obsessed with "novelty" which is a weaker form of originality. Very frequently there are ideas which are an obvious next step to everyone in the field, but the first person to actually implement and publish it is the one who will get the credit / future citations. I wouldn't consider those kinds of ideas original because many people already independently conceived them and are working on implementing them, but they are novel in that they haven't been instantiated before.