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I doubt that most researchers work in universities. Every large product company (food, pharma, automotive, gaming) has multiple research groups, and while they tend to be very small relative to the larger company they are probably much bigger than most academic departments.

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Add to this that there is a lot of research that goes into production processes and translation from a basic-sciences setting to a production setting.

So, say you have a novel antibody, you have to have a ton of non-academic researchers who have to figure out how to make the thing stable, safe, scalable, deliverable, cost-effective, etc.

It's all research, just not university-style research.

Another reason not to pursue university-style research is that historically a lot of scientific progress and even breakthroughs have occurred on the 'applied' side due to their access to reams of data and interest in process control and incremental refinement.

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