On Innovation

A Powerful New Engine for Growth & Innovation

Written by Jonathan Fegely | 6/30/2022

Every organization engaged in technical innovation – every company, government agency, university, investor, or entrepreneur – is seeking to uncover opportunities where they can create value in the world.  

Unfortunately, finding such opportunities can be extremely difficult. Beyond incremental product development and direct customer requests, organizations routinely struggle to develop the insight necessary for innovation. Many spend years and $ millions on market exploration, typically with limited success. Or worse, they create technology blindly, building products nobody needs.

As long-time innovation practitioners, we experienced this struggle first-hand, frustrated by the lack of effective tools and processes. Opportunities found via traditional, “top-down” market analysis are typically speculative and vague. Internal ideation efforts are too often driven by insular and biased thinking. And while customer interviews can uncover great opportunities, they can also feel like an unfocused and time-consuming process of turning over stones.

In 2014, we began seeking a new approach. In contrast to traditional techniques, we imagined that the ideal process would be:

  • Led by the market
  • Not internal solutions or pet projects-Driven by real customer needs
  • Not speculation
  • Able to produce specific, actionable opportunities
  • Capable of rapidly looking across many end-markets
  • Fast and efficient for innovation teams

Given advances in data availability and AI, we began building several new processes and tools to enable this kind of approach. After 7 years of development, and multiple patent-pending inventions, we are proud to launch the Aperture Discovery Platform, which enables innovation leaders to:

01

Explore the world’s largest database of problems and unmet needs. Leveraging proprietary AI, our system scans 100’s of millions of data sources to automatically identify and summarize needs from virtually any industry. You can instantly identify new and emerging problems, critical roadblocks for promising technologies, and much more.

02

Instantly connect the dots between compelling market needs and your organization’s unique capabilities. Each user can access a comprehensive profile of their organization’s strongest and most unique technologies to target problems that only you can address.

03

Create a consistent and repeatable pipeline of opportunities at your company – opportunities for sales, innovation, and R&D. When paired with smart and innovative users, Aperture produces specific and compelling hypotheses that can be rapidly tested in the market and built into larger, strategic opportunities.

We are currently partnering with several large, sophisticated companies and are now accepting new customers. Please get in touch with us directly to learn more about how you can work with us.