Agreed. I work in medical device engineering, and >50% of our time relates to simulation in some way. A big part of our responsibilities is designing, implementing, or reimplementing models of various subsystems relevant to our devices so we can do preliminary estimates of safety or efficacy. Analyzing real world outcomes is also important, although I haven't been at the company long enough yet for that to catch up with simulation in terms of how much time we spend on it.

I'd say the closest description to us in the article is the practical research team. We have fairly clear business goals we are fulfilling with our work.