Edison Jolts: Turning High-Risk Innovation Into Commercial Reality
Delivered Canada’s first cannabis lozenge in six months under severe regulatory, budget, and technical constraints, while establishing Organigram’s first formal innovation commercialization framework.
Case Study: Edison Jolts - First-to-Market Cannabis Lozenge Innovation & Commercialization
Challenge
Organigram had early R&D efforts on a new ingestible extract lozenge idea, aiming at a regulatory gray area with the potential to redefine how oral cannabis is consumed. The project faced significant regulatory, technical, and commercial risks: Health Canada could ban the product, confidence in its feasibility was limited due to a lack of stability data and full-scale testing, and the project needed to move quickly without substantial budget support. Meanwhile, internal commercial pressure and strategic goals were intense: the product had to launch rapidly, secure a first-mover advantage, and demonstrate true innovation leadership.
Action
As a Project Manager, I was brought in to turn the product from an experimental concept into a commercial success, compressing a 13-month development and launch plan into six months by running parallel workstreams and maintaining disciplined execution.
I led delivery across R&D execution, capital investment, manufacturing readiness, and commercial launch preparation, coordinating over 50 cross-functional contributors while reporting to the Director of Operational Excellence. Legal, Regulatory, Quality, and Operations were involved from the beginning, enabling issues to be identified and addressed in real time.
Given severe cost constraints, production solutions were developed using R&D equipment wherever feasible, maintaining strict compliance tolerances to stay within ingestible extract guidelines. My hands-on approach directly led to two major breakthroughs: resolving a critical production downtime problem and creating a novel engineering concept that resulted in the internally designed build of new scale-up equipment, bypassing the prototype phase entirely.
The project introduced agile working methods to Innovation at Organigram for the first time, focusing on bottom-up input, iterative improvements, and learning loops from production teams. At the same time, I created the company’s first structured framework for R&D-to-commercialization execution, establishing documentation, governance, and scalable process foundations that ultimately supported future Stage Gate adoption.
Edison Jolts launched safely, compliantly, and quickly, becoming the first cannabis lozenge in Canada.
Impact at a Glance
Collapsed launch timeline from 13 months to 6 months
Achieved true first-to-market advantage
Remained the only cannabis lozenge in Canada for over a year
Delivered $10.9M in retail revenue, with approximately 50 percent wholesale alignment
Demand exceeded expectations, requiring additional shifts and a second production site
Successfully managed compliance risk with fully engaged Legal, Regulatory, and Quality oversight
Maintained required tolerances for regulatory alignment until Health Canada later reclassified the category
Preserved and redefined the Edison brand, positioning it as an innovation-led product platform
Built Organigram’s first R&D → commercialization framework, now used as the internal model
Established the foundational structure that later evolved into a Stage Gate governance process
Demonstrated first meaningful application of agile principles within Innovation
Insight
Innovation leadership is not just about generating ideas; it emphasizes disciplined execution amid uncertainty. Edison Jolts demonstrated that speed, compliance rigor, and resource limitations can work together when governance, cross-functional teamwork, and agile feedback loops are integrated into the process from the beginning. True competitive advantage is achieved not only by launching a groundbreaking product but also by developing the organizational capacity to consistently transform high-risk innovations into successful commercial outcomes.