Best of luck in your quest, but if you focused on MONEY then airlines might listen. I would also suggest you reconsider your "...not significant enough to warrant grounding the plane.." comment for two reasons. Firstly, engineers work according to the manufacturer's manuals and have to either fix and sign off or defer any defect. Judgment and discretion are rapidly being taken from engineers. Secondly, a single failure of a monitored system will rarely bring down an aircraft. But if someone could use "big data" to predict system failures, then they will have a place in the industry. Furthermore, of things don't break then it will be harder for multiple failures to occur. And yes, we are already working on data projects like this.
PM