Sure, as I said there are cases on the margin, and those cases where you just happen to be working against a competitor who just happened to start working on the same problem at roughly the same time are most of 'em. I'm not convinced these sorts of scenarios are all that common, though. Most big success stories involve doing something that nobody else was doing.

According to my numbers derived ex anum I'd say that working twice as hard increases your chance of getting a big payout by... approximately ten percent.