Under that definition, very little is research. Warp drives is research. Curing cancer is engineering.
Obviously, you have implicit constraints in mind. "Is something possible given $constraints?". And the set of those constraints is where the line between research and engineering starts to blur. If you set $constraints to "in time and under budget for the project", which seems like a very reasonable value, then it turns out that a lot of programming tasks become research work, unless you're only churning out cookie-cutter websites.
We don't know if (all) cancer can be cured at all.
And no, "in time and budget" doesn't suddenly make something into a research project.
Speeding up some technical process might be research (eg, the old 1TB sorting benchmarks drove research).
But project constraints, and the fact that the team themself has never used a specific technology or whatever doesn't turn it into research. Yes, I know that's a term people use, but it's a different thing to scientific research.
Obviously, you have implicit constraints in mind. "Is something possible given $constraints?". And the set of those constraints is where the line between research and engineering starts to blur. If you set $constraints to "in time and under budget for the project", which seems like a very reasonable value, then it turns out that a lot of programming tasks become research work, unless you're only churning out cookie-cutter websites.