I develop a few suggestions how formal ontology can meet industry and practice. This is not just a matter of useful ontology-based applications. That is a necessary but also rather trivial idea that perpetuates the gap between fundamental and applied research and keeps alive associated outdated linear process ideas of innovation. Instead, I suggest that for further progress the ontology field is to move from a semantic to a pragmatic approach in the communication-theoretic sense. Formal pragmatics stands a better chance to provide a rational and scientific foundation for an integrated ontology theory as well as practice than the deductivist formal semantics approach.