Much has been reported on the challenges and gaps as to why innovation is not happening across Canada, yet this project took a different approach and examined successful innovation. This research could have concentrated on how businesses are overcoming the often-cited critical gaps for commercializing innovation: lack of capital; lack of collaboration between stakeholders in the quadruple helix of business, community, academy, and government; and a risk-adverse culture toward innovation and entrepreneurship (Hall et al., 2014; Innovate Manitoba, 2015.) Instead, we wanted to fill in a knowledge gap related to how innovation occurs, not generally, but specifically, with a preliminary study of 3 food processing companies.