After 63 years, Honest Ed’s is more than a store; it’s a well established and successful brand. Its architecture brings together vision, voice and benefits that together provide the inspiration and personality of a lasting brand. That is why, year’s later, Honest Ed’s remains memorable, instantly recognizable and has an emotional community-based appeal and relevance.

Successful brands are unique and beyond compare; they are instantly recognizable and build an emotional connection with their customers. A great brand should be distinct, exude personality and resonate loudly with a lucrative set of customers. Simply put, brand is the personification of your product or service, enabling customers to engage and build a relationship with it.

Are your customers still following a trail back to you decades later? If not, make 2012 your first step in building a lasting brand experience to delight your customers.

Image from a Shreddies campaign in 2008

When I ask business owners and managers about innovation, many of them talk about ideas they have percolating but they have never pursued.

They’re too busy fighting front-burner issues to think about anything new. But if innovation is going to be a source of new products and revenues, I have three words for you, from one of the world’s most innovative companies: Just Do It.

t’s as simple as that. Innovation is about bringing ideas to market rather than letting them languish on a half-forgotten scratchpad. And innovation doesn’t necessarily mean invention. More often, it’s about acting on an opportunity you have already recognized, or adapting existing solutions for other markets or industries.

How simple can innovation be? Consider these examples:

Seeing the same thing in a different way

Think of the publicity coup for Post’s Shreddies – and its 18-point gain in market share – when it reintroduced the timeless breakfast cereal in diamond shapes rather than squares.

Exploring new markets with the same products (or slightly adapted features)

Toy giant Lego has launched a Lego Friends brand to target girls in addition to its dominating “boy brands” such as Star Wars Lego and Lego Ninjago.

Tapping into (or teaming up with) new market trends

Hyundai now provides a multimedia tablet as an owner’s manual instead of the traditional printed book.

Bringing together features from existing products or markets to create something “new”

The maker of SLAP Watch offers a unique twist on silicone watches with interchangeable faces, bright colours, and spring-coil bracelet – all in one item.

Innovation is the engine that drives your business forward. Think about it: customers are engaged by new and exciting products and services. It gives them something to talk about, a reason to buy again, and more often.

You wouldn’t change the oil in your car just once a year – the engine would sputter and die. Your company shouldn’t leave ideation, innovation or the introduction of new – even small – improvements to an annual schedule. Without the tune-up of continuing innovation, your business will also sputter and die.

You should make 2012 the year that innovation becomes a continuous, front-burner activity, just like sales and marketing.

How do you take the first step in your business? Set aside a 15-minute slot in your weekly sales and marketing meeting. Ask everyone at the table to talk about one interesting innovation they have seen in your industry, or better yet, an industry far from your own. Discuss which examples are most applicable to your business, then charge a person or team to flesh those ideas out. Monitor their progress monthly in the same team meetings. Success breeds success, and feedback and inclusivity are its lifeblood.

Winning through innovation doesn’t have to be scary, painful or expensive. Business owners and managers can do it step by step. Start by creating an environment in which employees, trusted partners and even customers offer great new product and service ideas. The active ingredient in “win-novation” is simply creating a process to examine those ideas and pursue the best of them.

The cost is low, the potential sky-high. It’s better to implement a number of smaller innovations than to have big ideas and do nothing with them.

Once every quarter, I receive a beautiful invitation from my company’s law firm to attend a seminar to learn some important new fact about changes in the law. I never go.

Once every quarter, I receive a beautiful invitation from my accounting firm to learn something new about sales, marketing or motivation. I almost never miss it.

I applaud both firms’ efforts to engage their clients, but in this world of information overload, it’s more important than ever to engage in meaningful conversation with your customers. Service providers add value by enhancing the customer’s skill-set, not by telling them how they’ve improved their own.

Innovation isn’t about what interests you; it’s about what fascinates your customers.

With Dyson’s new bladeless fans, generation of kids will be denied the chance to stick pencils through the screen of the household fan to see what happens when they touch the spinning blades. Otherwise, you have to love U.K.-based Dyson, because its innovations are so obvious, yet so breakthrough: safe, bladeless fans that move air without the rumbling and rattling, using technology patterned after jet engines; dual-cyclonic vacuums that suck up more dirt, more efficiently; and airport hand driers that really work.

Why were these products not developed sooner? Did no other company listen to generations of frustrated consumers? Or were the former market leaders simply too afraid to cannibalize existing products and markets by introducing something truly innovative?

Dyson’s success is a lesson. Don’t be afraid to make yourself obsolete, or someone else will do it for you.

Research in Motion is takings its lumps these days, but I am impressed by RiM’s new 9900 series BlackBerry. Since fully touch-screen phones came out, I have resisted. I am not a short-form, emoticon kind of guy, and I never felt touch-screen phones were conducive to the long-form e-mails that occupy my day.

I always hoped somebody would combine a sturdy keypad with touch-screen navigation. Well, BlackBerry’s done it. Who knows, if the financial pundits would only leave them to their innovating ways, we might see more of the ground-breaking innovation that took RiM to the top for so long.

As tough as it may be, every company needs to block out the noise and keep a focused eye on new and relevant product introductions. Always.

So, I Googled the phrase “selling non-core assets” and you can see the results! Clearly, business leaders are hungry for information on how to offload underperforming assets and get back to growth from the core.

These search statistics confirm my inspiration for co-authoring The 90% Rule: What’s Your Next Big Opportunity – a book about growing through innovation in adjacent markets that you already know and understand.  The initial inspiration for the book was the constant flow of stories about companies selling their non-core assets.

The question remains, why do companies buy assets that aren’t essential? Are they so flush with cash, or do they just not understand their customers’ needs and desires?

Next time you are mulling a strategic investment, consider instead refocusing on your business’s core competencies. Build your company in logical next-steps. Oprah did fine by focusing an empire on self-improvement.  Disney succeeded with his fun, family- entertainment focus. And I don’t expect Apple to happen into the hamburger business.

“Selling non-core assets” is a Google search in which you don’t want your company to appear.

The program boasts an itinerary of specialized keynote speakers, workshops and networking opportunities to give professional insight to entrepreneurs. Learn more or register at www.smallbusiness-summit.ca.

From time to time I run across a book that is under the radar. Maybe it’s a niche book, a vanity book, a book that for whatever reason doesn’t fit the traditional model, or is self-published. As more and more authors choose to self-publish—some estimate that as high as 50 percent of the 11,000 business titles published annually are now self-published—more and more you can’t ignore the category, because some really good stuff falls into that bucket. And sometimes, simply because the book is off the radar, you don’t discover it until well after it’s been published.

That’s the case with the book we’re reviewing this week. It’s a book about how entrepreneurial thinking can inspire innovative and sustainable growth in your company, called The 90% Rule: What’s Your Next Big Opportunity? It was published in 2010 by Ken Tencer and John Paulo Cardoso, who co-own a small strategy and design firm called Spyder Works that has worked with some well known brands.

Although the authors intended the book for organizations of all sizes and shapes, I think it’s most appropriate for small business owners. After all, the authors are successful small business owners themselves.

Big idea:

The greatest opportunities for growth and success are based on what your company is already 90 percent capable of doing. In other words, it makes no sense to try and become an expert in a whole new field or own a new market when your next big opportunity in all probability lies in a simple extension or rethinking of your current business, brand or mastery.

Key takeaways:

The 90% Percent Rule integrates three fundamental principles of good business: Leverage, process, and entrepreneurial thinking into a pragmatic approach to business development. The authors employ a six-step process to identify opportunities to grow business and focus on those that will bring the most success. They use the visual you see below.

• Step 1: Square. Revisit your company’s beginnings and identify where you want to take it long-term. Foresight requires insight, which in turns demands hindsight. Looking back helps you identify the original driving forces behind growth. “Inspiration always has a starting point and where you will be tomorrow can draw heavily on the origins of that spark.”

• Step 2: Arrow. “Explore what can be, not just what you are. Entrepreneurs and innovators are ahead of the curve, ahead of the market, ahead of current thinking; whereas good managers are just slightly ahead of current thinking; average managers demonstrate current thinking; and managers who are behind the curve lose.”

• Step 3: Circle. Build a relevant brand rooted in customer-centric thinking. What is a relevant brand? It’s one that “delivers what the customers want in a way that is compelling and clearly differentiated from your competition. Whether you are building a company or selling a product or service, they should all be branded to ensure they find a relevant and lucrative market.”

• Step 4: Three arrows. Maximize leverage by outlining your best opportunities and the criteria upon which to assess them. Your company will “benefit far more from a growth strategy built on leveraging relevant opportunities than it can from ever-changing strategies and tactics based on short-term performance and chasing fragmented growth and hope.”

• Step 5: Matrix. Build an opportunity matrix to determine the human and financial resources required for moving ahead, built along a horizontal axis of short-term to long-term, and a vertical axis of human capital to financial capital. Quadrant 1 (upper left) is short-term implementation based on financial capital. Quadrant 2 (upper right) is long-term implementation based on financial capital. Quadrant 3 (lower right) is long-term implementation based on human capital. Quadrant 4 (lower left) is short-term implementation based on human capital.

• Step 6: Waves. Speak to be heard clearly by all your audiences. Thousands of great products, services and ideas fail simply because they don’t get noticed or no one understands them. A clear, compelling and consistent communication strategy “goes a long way to converting your opportunities and sustaining a relevant brand.”

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The simple language and clear example make The 90% Rule very easy to read and understand. Take this example of how to apply it to company growth:

“Define your prior year’s sales as your core sales. Set those core sales as 90 percent of the next year’s sales. If this core 90 percent of your business grows at 5 a year, then that generates 4.5 percent annual growth. Now, add a new product, service, store or vertical that expands your sales base by an additional 10 percent. Result: You will achieve annual growth of 14.5 percent. If you can continue this incremental growth strategy, your business will double in size in about five years. Just as important, that growth will require only moderate investment in terms of financing, staffing, and operations. Your business can make a big impact with small, logical, manageable next steps.”

Best for…

If you’re a fan of strengths-based performance, believe in the “hedgehog” principle (do one thing and do it better than anyone else), and buy into the popular idea that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert or master in something, you’ll like this book—for the simple reason that wherever you are, you’re already 90 percent of the way there. It’s what you do with that 90 percent, of course, and the remaining 10 percent, that make the difference.

In a recent white paper written for the American Management Association, Mitchell identifies four key conditions a company must put in place to achieve results from their innovation efforts. He calls them “The 4 Ps of Innovation”: Priority, Plan, People and Process.

Priority: As simplistic as it sounds, says Mitchell, your organization has to make innovation a priority. “Organizations fail because innovation, as a true, organized effort, always falls off the to-do list or never makes it on the list at all,” he says. Top management must commit to innovation, “lay out the overall goals and make the commitment to resources they believe it will take to reach those goals.”

Plan: Innovative organizations must set specific goals and determine ways of reaching those goals. A formal innovation plan should be written and shared. The plan should include your specific objectives and the strategies (people, tactics, resources) required to meet them.

People: Your innovation team must be carefully selected and receive the same attention accorded to any senior-level advisory board. In composing your team, don’t choose only “creative types.” Mitchell says that idea people must be balanced by more practical types who know how to achieve even the wildest ideas.

Process: Innovation is not a freewheeling brainstorm session; it’s a disciplined process. You need a step-by-step framework for generating, evaluating, and moving ideas along the development path. Especially important is how your ideas will be nurtured and funded, as well as how you will decide whether each idea as a go or no-go. (See The 90% Rule for lots of ideas on creating a winning process.)

Finally, Mitchell notes your company will also need a culture that supports innovation. You have to lose your fear of failing, and accept that mistakes are part of the learning process. Otherwise, he warns, your embedded culture will likely ensure that “only the safest ideas are put forward and nothing significantly innovative ever gets done.”

It’s not a matter of waiting and waiting till you hit a home run. Successful innovation is all about getting the basics right every day, and hitting lots of singles.

One innovative-thinking technique we use at Spyder Works is the “Rule or Guideline?” game. We ask clients to write down a list of all the rules at their businesses that they know they mustn’t break. These lists invariably include laws, safety rules and industry regulations, but also lots of conventions, rules of thumbs, best practices and bad habits. We then ask the clients to cross off all the rules that have been legislatively imposed – the rules where an authority can actually punish you for violating. You don’t want to break those rules.

What you have left is a list of guidelines that your organization or industry has created – many of which are now deadweights, like barnacles that have to be constantly scraped off the side of navy ships. Turn those mental barriers inside out, and you suddenly become open to all kinds of innovative thoughts and ideas.

Let’s say you’re a producer of consumer and commercial glues. The No. 1 rule is that your product has to stick things together securely, right? After all, what good is a glue that doesn’t stick very well? The 3M scientist who questioned that assumption, that “given”, that idea-limiting “rule,” created a huge new product called Post-It Notes.

Innovation isn’t invention: It’s a series of little steps that lead to big breakthroughs. You need to learn to question your assumptions about what your products are and do, and rethink your connection with your customers.

We ask our clients to find time to regularly think about the needs of their customers. What frustrates them or prevents our clients from delivering greater value to their clients? How could our product or services help them with those problems? These are the million-dollar questions that can help you identify gaps where other organizations would be willing to pay good money for your innovative solutions.