Taking On the World

Canadian business history offers few examples of successful manufacturing companies that have conquered the world. There’s Bombardier in aerospace and mass transit, Magna in auto parts and McCain in frozen food (if you count pizza and fries as manufactured goods). The list in technology is particularly slim. Nortel Networks sat atop the telecom industry for a while, before collapsing. For a long time Canada did not have a consumer technology giant to rival Nokia in Finland, Ericsson in Sweden or Apple and Motorola in the United States.

Then, out of nowhere, sprang Research In Motion, an entrepreneurial start-up based in Waterloo, Ontario, and maker of the got-to-have-it BlackBerry. Founded by Mike Lazaridis, the son of Greek immigrants to Canada, RIM began life quietly in 1984 as a small technology contractor before making the decision to develop wireless email solutions. Years of dedicated and painstaking research led to the line of fabulously successful BlackBerry...