I.D.E.A.


Man

by Brenda Boughton

Jim Balsillie’s whirlwind schedule is enough to make your head spin. Good thing he has a handy wireless communications device in his pocket to help him keep track of it all.

Who could have predicted, even five years ago, that the BlackBerry, this smartest of smartphones, would revolutionize the communications industry? Perhaps not even Balsillie himself, who, with co-CEO and company founder Mike Lazaridis, heads up Research in Motion, the wireless technology firm that has given us this handheld wizard, now available in 160 countries around the globe.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the BlackBerry. In January, RIM celebrated the shipment of its 50 millionth smartphone. Of those 50 million BlackBerrys, 26 million were sold in the past year alone. It is the top-selling smartphone in North America, and depending on how you define “smartphone,” some consider it the global leader as well. The Waterloo, Ont., company that had fewer than 10 employees when Balsillie joined it in 1992 now has 12,000 on the payroll, has continued to hire aggressively during the global economic downturn, and today is worth about US$45 billion.

RIM is a Canadian and international success story thanks to the technical genius of Lazaridis and the business savvy of Balsillie, whose entrepreneurial skills first surfaced when he was a young boy in Waterloo holding down several paper routes and selling greeting cards door to door.

In 1984 Balsillie completed his Bachelor of Commerce degree at Trinity College at the University of Toronto, where he also won Athlete of the Year. After working as a chartered accountant he went on to earn an MBA at Harvard in 1989.

He joined RIM in 1992, investing $250,000 of his own money into the firm, at a time when Lazaridis and his RIM researchers discovered a way not only to receive a message on a pager, but to send a message back. The company then shifted its focus from developing pagers to working on two-way wireless communication. It was a good decision.

Since then, Balsillie’s passion for making RIM the leader in “convergence technology” is matched by his passion for convergence of a human kind: in recent years he has ensured that this country’s leading thinkers, researchers, and students specializing in global issues have the resources and facilities they need to enhance Canada’s understanding of the world and its place in it.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that his philanthropic pursuits, like his day job, have significant global impact.