NPD as a Service · Edison Innovations
We find the products hiding in your customer friction data — validate them commercially, protect them with IP, and deliver them as new revenue before a competitor or startup does it first.
The Opportunity
"A company website is a patent claim in plain English. We know how to read both."
Edison Innovations was built on a single observation: every product that has been on the market for more than eighteen months is surrounded by customers who have built workarounds — improvised solutions, hired contractors, cobbled-together integrations — that prove, beyond any survey, what the next product should be.
We call it the Shadow Product. It exists in every company with an existing customer base. It is unprotected, unnamed, and invisible to the people best positioned to launch it first.
Our methodology — the Three-Lens Adjacency System — finds it. From a company's own website or business plan. From their customer friction data. From their patent portfolio. Three sources, one analytical question, one answer: a new product concept that arrives at development already commercially validated and IP-protected.
The opportunity is not a niche. Every company with a website, a product, and a customer is a potential engagement. Four hundred million companies worldwide are generating this signal every day and have no systematic way to read it. That is the market Edison Innovations is building to serve.
The Pattern
In every case below, the company that owned the customer relationship had the signal in their own data. In every case, someone outside the building read the workaround first and built the product.
Blockbuster's own numbers showed late fees were the #1 customer frustration, year after year. They protected the revenue rather than solved the pain. Reed Hastings paid a $40 late fee for Apollo 13 and founded Netflix specifically to eliminate that friction. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010. The shadow product had been in their own support data for a decade. No one there read it the right way.
Kevin Systrom built and launched Burbn with real funding. Users ignored nearly everything except one feature: apply a photo filter, share an image. Systrom stripped the app to its bones, rebuilt it around the workaround, and relaunched as Instagram. Facebook acquired it for $1 billion in 2012. The shadow product was in the usage data of the app he had already shipped.
Stewart Butterfield's gaming company ran four years and never found its market. But to run the company, his team improvised an internal messaging tool to coordinate distributed development. When Glitch shut down, that workaround was worth more than the product they had been trying to sell. Salesforce acquired Slack in 2020 for $27.7 billion.
Spencer Silver invented a weak adhesive at 3M in 1968 that no one found a use for. Six years later, a choir singer frustrated with bookmarks falling from his hymnal applied the adhesive to small pieces of paper. That workaround became Post-It Notes. 3M now generates over $1 billion annually from that product family. The shadow product had existed for six years before anyone read the signal.
"The company best positioned to find the shadow product first already owns the customer relationship. The question is whether they have a methodology to read what that relationship is telling them."
The Three-Lens Adjacency System
The same analytical question — What adjacencies does this company's existing capability create? — can be asked from three different source documents. The lenses run in sequence. Together they deliver a new product concept grounded in documented capability, confirmed by real customer behavior, and protected by IP before development capital is committed.
A company website is a patent claim in plain English. Every company that has articulated what it does has implied what it could do — for customers and markets it hasn't yet named. We read your publicly available materials as a functional capability description and map the adjacency opportunities your own language points to, including customer segments you're already serving without realizing it and use cases your capability handles but nobody's positioning for.
What could this company be doing, for whom, that its own materials imply but haven't stated?
We synthesize customer friction signals from multiple sources simultaneously: support transcripts, return and churn data, review language across platforms, peer forum threads, competitive reviews praising alternatives, and interviews with frontline staff who hear what customers actually say. The signal we isolate is not feature requests — it's functional compensations. Workarounds. Evidence that demand has already been validated by what customers are doing without being asked. That is the gold standard of market proof.
What products are your customers already buying from themselves that you should be selling to them?
For companies with existing IP, we apply formal adjacency analysis to the patent claims themselves — identifying markets, applications, and customer segments the claim language already covers but the holder hasn't pursued. Used after Lenses One and Two, the opportunity field has already been validated before the patent analysis begins, so the IP work is focused rather than speculative.
What is this IP already legally allowed to do that its owner isn't doing?
Services
Each tier is a standalone deliverable — a written report you can act on, share with partners, or use as the foundation for the next engagement.
We read your publicly available materials — website, investor deck, marketing, job postings — and return a map of three to five adjacency opportunities your company hasn't named yet. No proprietary access required. Delivered in two weeks.
The complete Three-Lens methodology. Multi-source friction synthesis, commercial viability filtering, cross-industry analogue evaluation, and Provisional Patent Application filing on the validated concept.
All three lenses applied across your full product portfolio and IP holdings. Designed for companies with multi-product lines and a mandate for systematic new product development — PE-backed or otherwise.
For PE Operating Partners
Mid-market PE firms carry ten to thirty portfolio companies simultaneously — each one generating shadow product signals right now. The Three-Lens Adjacency System applies across all of them, producing a systematic pipeline of protected new product opportunities timed to the growth mandate before exit.
"PE operating partners are mandated to find growth before exit. We give them a system to find it — already validated, already protected, ready to develop."
The Team
What most innovation firms separate — the market side and the IP side — Edison Innovations treats as a single discipline. The Three-Lens Adjacency System reflects that integration.
45+ years developing market-driven solutions across luxury real estate, telecommunications, government innovation, and technology commercialization. Strategic projects valued from $7M to $2B+. The market-intelligence architecture of the Three-Lens System is drawn from direct experience finding latent demand in categories where conventional research missed the signal.
59 years in technology commercialization, licensing, and new venture creation. His accredited courses — among them Licensing the Future, Commercializing New Technologies, and From Invention to Product to Market — have been taught at more than 30 universities and institutions across five continents. Special programs conducted for NASA, the USPTO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, and the U.S. Departments of Commerce and Energy.
Get Started
A Document Adjacency Scan requires no proprietary access and delivers a written report of your adjacency opportunities within two weeks. It is the fastest way to see the methodology at work.
Request an Adjacency Scan