Investors love being involved in innovative companies. The market's love affair with Apple (AAPL) and Amazon.com (AMZN) serve as evidence to that end. Few things are more thrilling than seeing a company bring a new and highly-marketable product to the market, and seeing it turn into a reward for shareholders with the foresight to take a shot.

But there's a scenario that investors love just as much as (if not more than) buying an innovator. That's buying into a turnaround story.

Redemption is a powerful aphrodisiac, and for good reason. General Motors (GM), Delta Air Lines (DAL) and even the aforementioned Apple were once on the brink of total collapse, but each managed to regroup and reward investors for their faithfulness.

There's a fresh crop of turnaround stories - and in some cases even step into - on the market's horizon. A fair warning: None of these overhaul efforts are guaranteed to take hold. But some of them could be lucrative opportunities for the aggressive, and all of them should be fun to watch unfold.

BlackBerry

Courtesy Blackberry

BlackBerry (BB, $10.54) - the company that invented smartphones only to be completely squeezed out of that market - never really went away. But it's barely in the smartphone-manufacturing business anymore; it merely licenses the name. Instead, it is focused on offering software that makes smartphones more secure, and ultimately more powerful to business users.

So far, it seems to be the right move.

BlackBerry is finding far more success as a software outfit than it ever could be as a device maker that must compete with the likes of Apple or Samsung (SSNLF). Its fourth-quarter software and services revenue was up 18.6% year-over-year, and its technology solutions (the arm that's addressing the growing internet-of-things market) revenue grew 31.4%.

The job isn't completely finished, but by and large the repair work for this once-iconic company is over. As CEO John Chen recently put it, "We're done with the turnaround,