[bakuninsbart]

That is so narrow a definition of scientific research it excludes many major contributions to our base of knowledge. The primary difference between engineering and science is the intention - Scientists want to understand how things work by using the scientific method, engineers want to make stuff that works, but this still often includes iterating over designs by using empirical data.

If a team of engineers find a cool new algorithm to make computer vision easier, we learnt something new about the world in the process. On the flip-side, you actually have plenty of research in fields you would consider science, eg. physics, that do not use the scientific method at all, but instead deduce possibilities based on mathematical modelling.