Everyday Edisons has become one of my favorite television programs. It chronicles the process by which individual inventions are transformed into retail-ready products. The viewer is introduced to ten ordinary people each with a passion for invention. Their ideas range from the quirky to the just plain fun: cat emery boards, bubble lamps, book covers and other ordinary items become new again with their fresh take. The program follows the engineering team’s efforts to make workable prototypes from these ideas, bearing in mind reasonable production costs to bring these products to market. The branding team comes up with names, design logos for the products and packaging. The public relations expert provides insights into her strategies for promoting the product and the sales and marketing people pitch the retailers to get the product onto store shelves. And, of course, the lawyers come up with the reasons as to why the names would infringe on the intellectual property rights of others and generally play bad cop! The inventors go on an emotional roller coaster as proofs of concept are demonstrated or not, prototypes fail and have to be revised or the product comes out brilliantly but is too expensive to produce for a mass market. The television camera is great for catching the visible disappointment on the inventors’ faces when they are presented with a name for their products that the clearly don’t like. But that is the trade-off of bringing an idea to fruition and scale, the inventor defers to the marketing people for certain key decisions. The program is a fun overview of the process and also features interviews with officials from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, marketing/branding experts, and industry leaders, such as the founders of Virgin USA Money, Dyson and Amazon. The program is named after Thomas Edison an investor who, despite having little formal education, registered 1,000 patents for his work. You can find the program on the website, at the Public Broadcasting Service site or on Hulu.