I recently had the pleasure of attending the Canadian Marketing Association’s annual Digital Marketing Conference. The conference is a place where the marketing industry as a whole comes together to network, attend sessions, and more importantly learn how to improve their existing businesses.

The keynote which I took the most from was delivered by Dr. Anita Sands who today holds the distinction of being the VP of Innovation at RBC (www.rbc.com). She touched upon what RBC’s views were on innovation, she reminded the crowd that sometimes innovation is small, that at the end of the day innovation is about what is of value to your customers. It is not about re-inventing the wheel but making the wheel more effective.

The key statements I took out of her presentation are as follows:

* Innovation connects what is possible to what is valuable to our clients and our shareholders.

* Don’t mistake innovation for invention; innovation doesn’t have to be something new.

* New ways of applying old stuff, or kind of new stuff.

* APPLIED innovation. Ideas are not the problem. Implementation and measurement are the challenge.

Coming out of this session it got me to thinking. Facebook.com did not create the social networking scene; they improved upon it by adding further value to its users. Google.com did not create the search engine; again they improved upon it. My company took the idea of the “do-it-yourself “Website Creation tool and added a “build-it-for-you” service on top of it, for customers who are both on a budget and lack time to build their own site. I could go on and on. The point is many companies have been successful in re-thinking and improving upon an existing idea. It does not make them any less innovative. At the end of the day, the company sees growth and the customer is happy.