How to balance reading the literature and just solving the problem your self? I work for a company that has several projects involving computer vision. The literature rarely has papers on the exact problems we are solving. Furthermore, the state of the art in much of computer vision is often not reproducible or not ready for actual applications. Furthermore, the rate at which new papers come out in the areas we are interested in would make it very time consuming to digest most, let alone all of them.

On the other hand, we often get stuck and would like to get answers or at least inspiration from existing work.

Our goal in the end is to get to solutions as fast as possible. Does anyone have any guidance on how to balance time spent reading vs doing?
There is a wonderful quotation by Frank Westheimer that accurately summarizes the relationship between work and reading:


  A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library.


If you don't know what's in the literature, you can easily spend days, weeks, or even months reinventing the wheel. It's tempting to get your hands dirty, but it can be a very expensive proposition if you later find that somebody else has already done the same thing.