BlackBerry: Innovation Behind the Icon

Research in Motion founder Mike Lazaridis talks about building a successful R&D culture and a decade of sustainable innovation

There is probably no more powerful a symbol of the change that wireless technology is bringing to daily life than the BlackBerry. Its very name has come to indicate: The person carrying this is hyper-productive and never out of contact. And there are lot of these folk—more than 14 million at last count.

The stock performance of BlackBerry's maker, Canada's Research In Motion (RIMM), has been nothing short of phenomenal in the decade since the first devices—called Inter@ctive Pagers— hit the market in the summer of 1998.

In those days only the obsessively connected wore pagers. To send the wearer a message, you called a living, breathing telephone operator who would type your words and send them along, making the device chirp like an agitated parakeet. The idea of a constant connection to the same e-mail messages that resided on your office desktop PC was a foreign one. A decade later, living without that connection is almost unthinkable to many.

For much of that, you can thank Mike Lazaridis, co-chief executive officer and founder of RIM. He dropped out of the University of Waterloo in Ontario in 1984, a few classes short of a degree in electrical engineering, and started the company that year. Early products were radio modems for point-of-sale terminals and wireless data insert cards for notebook PCs. It has been a busy decade. Lazaridis recently sat down with BusinessWeek's Arik Hesseldahl to talk about the lessons RIM has learned about innovation in that time.

In tough economic times, companies start looking for places to cut, and very often that's in research and development. RIM is growing like crazy and doesn't need to worry about that now, but that wasn't always the case. How did you get to this point where your innovation has paid off?

If you really want to build something sustainable and innovative you have to invest in R&D. If you build the right culture and invest in the right facilities and you encourage and motivate and inspire both young and seasoned people and put them all in the right environment—then it really performs for you. It's what I call sustainable innovation. And it's very different from the idea that you come up with something and then maximize value by reducing its costs. But building a sustainable innovation cycle requires an enormous investment in R&D. You have to understand all the technologies involved,

There's more to the BlackBerry than just the gadget itself.

Right. Everyone focuses on the iconic object, but they forget the enormous investment we've made in security technology, the private network system, the server technologies built for all the e-mail systems, not just one. We didn't just buy an operating system from one company and a radio technology from another, and have them assembled somewhere in Asia. We actually built the whole thing. It gives us an opportunity to build on something that is strong and well-founded, and I don't mind investing in it because I know there's a return.

Let's say I'm a new RIM employee fresh out of graduate school. What do I need to know about RIM's culture? Where do the ideas come from?

Well, one place they come from is weekly vision meetings where I talk to various teams that we bring in. We also have all these committees, and I know it sounds very bureaucratic, but these are brainstorming leadership committees on everything from technology to research and development, manufacturing to the user interface of the product. You don't have to be an executive to be on these committees. It all depends on your capability.

So you're in with the engineering teams who bring ideas to you that may or may not prove fruitful down the line? How do you keep them focused on things that are likely to pay off?

We use the product. The whole company uses the product. It makes us very competitive and it brings discipline to our interactions.