At my college, students are getting ready to defend their projects. This felt like an appropriate time to drop this post. This short post is not enough to cover the nuances and details that differentiate academic and industry projects. I will therefore assume the reader to be a student that has yet to undertake a substantial project. What I am going to say can be trivial to the rest. Furthermore, my examples will be biased towards computer engineering because that is what I am trained in. I will try to state in a way that can be relatable for other engineering disciplines. Stage is set, on towards the topic.
Academic projects are different from projects in the industry. You might be looking at the same problem but the way you approach them are different. When you are employed in an industry (not necessarily limited to the software development sector), your boss (manager) will come up to you and ask to write a program and install it in two weeks. You do a satisfactory job and that will make everyone happy. The same solution might not make your academic supervisor happy. The criteria for a solution to be "satisfactory" is different.
Academic projects ask for the problem to be put in 'context' before searching for solutions. They ask to provide 'justifications' for all the choices made on the way to a solution. These take a lot of time which is one of the reasons why these are avoided, unless they are absolutely necessary. If some hack seems to work, you can go ahead without the need for looking into why it worked.
Why are they present in academic projects? Academic projects expect students to "learn" to develop ideas and arguments. Students are expected to "understand" the problem. To do so one has to examine the problem in context. After doing that one sees many choices to approach the problem. For each approach the student should be able to develop arguments, for and against. Then you select one with appropriate justification, all the time observing the context.
When you have two weeks to turn in a software, by the way clients always expect the product to be delivered 'yesterday', this is not a viable approach. It is also not necessary. The aim of industry project is not necessarily to contribute to knowledge and advance the field. It is to meet the client's requirements. As long as you tick the right boxes you march on.
Academic projects finally answer the single most common question asked by undergraduate students "why do we have to study so many subjects from so many disciplines?". If you are interested in stock-market prediction, you have to look into macroeconomics and political sciences. If you are interested in writing a software that recommends something, you have to perform user behaviour analysis. This can range from simple (looking at purchase patterns to recommend products) to complex (observing working, eating, sleeping patterns to recommend a healthy diet). Your project might focus less on theory and more on development or vice versa. The project still spans many disciplines. A common reason to why many Management Information Systems (fail) is not being to capture the "need" and not meeting "expectations". You need to know how an organization runs and what the manager does. You might even have to go through legal documents to decide what not to miss in the tax invoices.
Academic project is a chance to make your contribution. This is going to be the first time you do it. You develop your own ideas, arguments and make choices. You also learn to appreciate what others have already done. You then provide justification for the solution in the given context.