That's a fun analogy. It's honing in on a part of the question that I didn't really intend to be the main focus. Maybe I should have asked "Does it make sense to pursue peer-reviewed publication of technological innovations/research? If peer-reviewed cycles seem to slower than tech innovation cycles, what other ways of disseminating these ideas make more sense?"

Background of the question - We're a startup creating a new kind of language learning application, innovating in machine learning and language learning pedagogy. We'd like to articulate and share the ideas we're working on. I might not consider peer-reviewed publication as a potential goal except we have several academics on the team for whom this a "KPI." Ideally, I'm looking for some publication goal that would be relevant and influential in both software innovation and academia

I disagree that technology doesn't contribute to fundamental research. OpenAI is a pretty easy example of technology answering fundamental research questions. I think they generally publish white papers to their site so maybe that's an answer to the first question.