Are you tired of being told you need to innovate?

If you’re a small business owner in Atlantic Canada, you’re in a club with about 84,000 other members and you’ve probably heard that phrase. With small businesses making up 98% of businesses in the region (as of June 2025), it’s imperative that we have strong, resilient companies and innovation can be a catalyst to help.

What does innovation mean for my business?

Innovation for small businesses includes new, novel and sometimes unique products, services, processes or business models, usually in response to either opportunities present in the market or issues being faced in the business or in the industry. It is different from improvement, which is about making changes to your business using known or existing solutions.

Whether you’re a car wash offering a subscription instead of per-use charges (that’s a local example of a business model innovation), or you’re a manufacturer like Apex Industries (my former employer) who used a process innovation with a gravity-based system to separate CNC fluid from metal shavings to increase the price of its waste metal shavings, there are many opportunities to innovate. Here are a few more examples:

• Products: A manufacturer might provide an all-in-one prefab kit to allow contractors to quickly build and install something that ordinarily takes many pieces and hours to assemble.
• Services: A seafood company might supply a food traceability solution that allows customers to see in real-time where their food comes from until time of delivery to their home.
• Processes: A restaurant might pilot running a ghost kitchen and a full-service restaurant at certain times of the year to help offset declines in volumes.
• Business Model: Plumbing or HVAC companies might employ a technique like servitization to ensure that their industrial customers and those with high up-time needs have parts ready for all their needs, on demand, 24/7.

As you read this, I’m sure you’re thinking about examples of how it could apply to your business. Often, your customers and staff can help you see opportunities for innovation from an internal perspective, where having a deep understanding of your industry (and others), as well as a deep understanding of your customer, can help inform an externally driven innovation offering.

It’s imperative that you have a way to gather information and analyze it. This could be as simple as a suggestion box as a means of input and then periodically reviewing the data to see what opportunities might exist. For more mature organizations, other inputs like your helpdesk, service calls, online customer comments and reviews and other data sources could be factored into this analysis, too.

Is it true that I need to innovate?

I would ask this: is your business healthy and resilient today? Will it be healthy in five years? Ten years? If yes or no, how do you know? Gathering information and perspectives from customers, employees and others can help you mitigate blindspots, too. This can help inform if there are immediate innovation opportunities, or improvements needed.

Technologies can be an innovation, or, can enable the innovation. It’s critical – no matter what you’re doing – to do small tests, validate, and derisk investments as you consider innovation.

A helpful filter I would offer you: as things continue to change, will the status quo cut it for you? If not, you may need to innovate, or improve your business.

Why and when to innovate?

When should you innovate? You should explore it when you see an opportunity. You have to consider cash and cashflow, as innovation may be costly, depending on what you’re doing in terms of products, services, processes and business model.

One real life example from a local manufacturing business in the region during an economic downturn saw a company vault from about 25% to 75% market share by investing in product development during a time when others were cutting or holding investments. The CEO had deep knowledge about the industry and their competitors, and those insights provided the opportunity to grab significant market share.

There have been great product innovations in Atlantic Canada like wood-based paper, the hockey stick, or the snowblower: the innovative spirit runs deep in our region. For Robert Carr Harris back in 1870, he saw deep snow as an opportunity and he created the snowblower. What’s on your horizon where you could innovate?

Of course, innovation doesn’t happen overnight, but, if you start with getting good informational inputs, test what could be possible, and continue to look ahead and keep an open mind, you’ll see greater opportunities compared to those that don’t hold these practices.

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Jonathan Dunnett helps business leaders build strategic relationships and make better decisions. Through jonathandunnett.com and enableleaders.com, he works with entrepreneurs and executives on innovation strategy, partnership evaluation, organizational growth, and developing the professional networks that drive long-term success.

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