Let’s clarify a few points. This column is called Strategy and Innovation, and here’s why. A few years back, after seeing Michael E. Porter of the Harvard Business School speak in Halifax, I went on a “strategy” binge, reading too many Harvard Business Reviews and books about business and military strategy and attending seminars by the likes of organizational consultant Robert Fritz and Brian Bacon, a world-renowned strategist and advisor on organizational reform. Inevitably, I began combining and re-combining to come up with my own take on the subject.

Then I started to do the same thing on the topic of innovation, including taking in the Innovation Forum hosted by Fortune magazine in New York City last fall to learn from the founders of FedEx Corp., Starbucks Corp., and Home Box Office Inc. I started developing my own ideas on the subject, then I started to notice an overlap between topics. For one thing, they share an emphasis on objectivity and creativity. If you study the great strategists in history, from Genghis Khan and Napoleon Bonaparte to Henry Ford and the management of Wal-Mart, you’ll find that they excel at both disciplines. In business as well as war, creativity and objectivity are almost useless one without the other.

It’s the same for the great innovators—from Leonardo da Vinci and James Watt to Guglielmo Marconi, Nikola Tesla, and the guys who produce modern software—there is an almost rhythmic interplay between objectivity and creativity. If you are skeptical of the creativity part, remember that virtually every scientific and technical advance in human history, from manned flight to splitting the atom, was declared impossible by leading authorities of the day.

Now let’s zero in on a local firm that has nailed both strategy and innovation. Whitehill Technologies Inc. of Moncton, N.B., is the recipient of this year’s Innovation Award, which was presented by NRC/IRAP/APCC at the Progress TOP 101 receptions this fall. The fact that the award is a joint sponsorship by these players is a strategic innovation in itself, showing how regional technology and business interests are uniting to promote innovation and commercialization.

The same week in October, Whitehill was one of 14 companies recognized by ACOA and the New Brunswick business community for its recent success and the valuable contribution innovative companies make to their communities.

Meanwhile, at the Information Technology Association of Canada’s annual meeting, which was held in Halifax in September,

Peter Carbone, a vice-president of Nortel, spoke about the “path to cash.” In his view, there are four phases for technology firms: research, validation, incubation (of the business model as well as the technology), and monetization, where you invest to compete at scale. Many small businesses are impatient of the intermediate steps of validation and incubation, he said. They either obsess about the technology so much that they lose sight of the market or they are so market focused that they rush to launch products prematurely. Either way, these firms can sow the seeds of their own destruction.

Whitehill is an example of a firm that has found this balance. Specializing in document and compliance automation software for insurance carriers and law firms (replacing an inefficient paper trail with a seamless digital one), the firm has offices in Canada and the U.S. and more than 1,000 customers in 45 countries. Most impressive of all from a business standpoint, it manages to combine profitability and consistent revenue growth.

Speaking with Whitehill COO Steve Palmer, you realize they have the intermediate stages figured out. “For a new product, technology, or solution, we do a significant amount of validation with potential partners, clients, analysts, and so on, but we don’t change our business model that much,” he says. “We want to ensure that our capability to deliver solutions is repeatable and that it is profitable.”

The term “innovation” has become a buzzword in business, the Holy Grail among government policy-makers and CEOs alike. Like all great truths it can become a truism, a cliché—and, eventually, meaningless. Yet you will notice that strong innovators, like good strategists, are in fact rare. Many talk the talk, but those who can conceive and execute with consistency are not that common.

Even former titans Ford Motor Company and General Motors Corp. are now threatened in both innovation and strategy by Japanese automakers such as those at Toyota Motor Corp., who—get this—went to school by studying the writings of the original Henry Ford and American statistician and quality theorist W. Edwards Deming. (The latter, by the way, told the American carmakers what the Japanese were up to in the 1970s, but they didn’t believe his reports.)

You don’t have to go far if you want a lesson in both strategy and innovation. Just keep your eyes on Whitehill Technologies