There's a few options in between, namely the "industry professor" and the "industrial researcher". Many universities will hire someone with suitable industry experience who has previously adjuncted to teach classes and occasionally do research as a "Visiting professor" (but you have to be good at both sides, think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjarne_Stroustrup).

There are also numerous roles in industry which do research (even Oracle has a research lab!). This is probably the easier route, especially if you're not as keen on teaching, and more and more companies are open to people doing speculative work and publishing papers (note that i'm making the assumption we're generally talking about software development, ML, hardware development, etc).