What do you mean by "too academically focused" ? Developing new methods?
"I made a huge difference for the business by being thoughtful about feature selection and then applying a bog-standard regression method" isn't appealing to the academic mindset.
So, what I mean is that people are looking for something where they can apply one team's work and use it across many teams. The more the better. The idea is that you don't have to have many people being thoughtful producing methods, you just need many working hard applying them. If there is a better term for that, I'm game to use it.