On a recent dark and snowy night, I attended a presentation by a small group from Bay Wind Fields, a company based in Digby County, N.S. It’s in the early stages of a new industry: using Atlantic Canada’s strong “wind regime” to generate electric power. Watching the presentation, I was thinking about how strategy and innovation have a lot in common—they are both about making things up. Yet contrary to a lot of theory, successful strategists and innovators tend not to be visionaries who are fixated on some idealized future.

Rather, they tend to know a lot about the past and have a clear appreciation of the present. The past is where all the learning is; strategists and innovators know a lot about the history of their fields, and they try to be objective about the present—the hand they are dealt right now—but that’s not enough. They also need the “X” factor—creativity, which has two components: the powerful but unpredictable flash of insight and the more pedestrian but equally valuable role of trial and error.

Good writing is all about rewriting; it’s a messy process. Early engineering drawings may bear little resemblance to the final result. Beethoven’s compositions were heavily marked up. In commerce, early versions of products, services, and business models usually undergo radical changes on the way to success in the marketplace.

From a conventional viewpoint, creativity involves making mistakes, especially early on. It is often messy and incomplete. Over the short term, it may lead to failure. Henry Ford’s creation of the modern automobile industry is a classic business story. I have read a lot about it over the years, but one piece of the puzzle seemed to be missing: the role of failure. That is until the other day, when I learned that Ford’s first car company had gone bankrupt. He may have been a business genius, but like most of today’s technology entrepreneurs, he had his share of stumbles early on.

Similarly, the struggles of the local wind industry are just growing pains. The Bay Winds presentation showed how hard it is to start something new. The whole industry has many questions: about the wind, how to finance the projects, and where to sell the power and at what price. Many of the questions don’t yet have definite answers.

As with any new industry, there have been missteps and false starts. Critics and naysayers abound. Business concerns aside, they say that there isn’t enough wind; financing and rates of return are uncertain; and the turbines are unsightly, noisy, and kill birds. Yet at the presentation there was excitement in the room — a sense of participating in the early stages of what will surely become a strong growth industry. Global demand for energy only will increase, and wind is a constant resource that is relatively easy to explore and to harness. It’s one of the greenest and least disruptive forms of generation. Atlantic Canada has one of the best wind regimes in North America; it only remains to create strong business models — partly by trial and error — to make the industry a growing concern.

The presentation reminded me of another pioneer in Nova Scotia’s energy business. Like all innovators, Roy Jodrey had a talent for spotting what was right in front of his eyes. As a young man in a region famous for its apples, he managed to get a job with one of the most successful apple traders in the Annapolis Valley, then went on to become an important player himself.

When electric power first came to the province, Jodrey realized that he could form a company to dam the Gaspereau River and sell electricity to local farmers. It was a small river and a small project, and he sold small contracts one at a time to the skeptical farmers. It became the basis for a thriving industrial empire that is still with us.

Apples, a small river, the invisible wind — these resources seem so modest that most of us would be unlikely to see their true potential. Seeing these resources clearly took objectivity. Combining them with other elements to build something new took creativity. Whether in strategy or innovation, both ingredients are vital.

When Leonardo da Vinci first began dissecting the human brain, his early drawings showed two internal structures that appeared in the medical texts of the day. His later drawings omitted them because, on close examination, he discovered they didn’t exist. He was one of the most creative people ever and, at the same time, one of the most objective. If this formula worked for him, shouldn’t the rest of us give it a try?