Global Courant 2023-05-07 13:00:08
The new BlackBerry movie is a celebration of the much-loved phone. It stars Hollywood actors and gives a behind-the-scenes look at the rise and fall of the Waterloo, Ontario-based company RIM.
But underneath it all, it’s a love letter to innovation. The BlackBerry has changed the way we work, live and communicate.
“How hugely significant the innovation these nerds came up with over a restaurant in Waterloo in 1996,” the movie star, Jay Baruchel, told CBC News at a recent red carpet event.
It’s easy to look back at BlackBerry’s spectacular rise and fall and focus on its fall. But Baruchel wanted to make a film that celebrated the rise – and the way a small Canadian company changed the world.
“The way we participate in the world, the way we interact with each other, it’s all on the shoulders of what they’ve created, for better or for worse,” Baruchel said.
“They’ve been toiling in obscurity long enough. And I want people to know that we innovate and rush and make as much of a mess as anyone else.”
The movie BlackBerry, starring actor Jay Baruchel (pictured), tells the story of how a Waterloo, Ont., company became a leader in technology innovation. (Height photos)
Shortcomings in Canada’s Innovation Ecosystem
The emergence of BlackBerry showed that Canada is as well placed as any other country on earth to build and develop new technologies. Those engineers above a Waterloo eatery created an entirely new class of product. At the same time, just outside Ottawa, Nortel engineers were breaking into equally important ground.
When they finally failed, there was no system to support the ideas and work that was still being done.
“In a system with the right kind of innovation policies and a real innovation environment, the demise of both (RIM and Nortel) would have instantly created a huge number of small businesses that could scale quickly,” said Dan Breznitz.
He is the Chair of Innovation Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He is also co-director of the Innovation Policy Lab and fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR).
He points to Silicon Valley in the US When Sun Microsystems collapsed in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, dozens of smaller companies were positioned to fill the gap.
“Look where Apple and Google’s headquarters are now. They’re on the old Sun campus,” he said.
But when Canada’s tech giants fell, nothing emerged from the wreckage.
“In Canada, they just disappeared. If you really look at a lot of the best sources that used to be from Nortel and BlackBerry, they’re now from Huawei,” Breznitz told CBC News. “That is a clear indication of a horrific innovation policy failure and a truly horrific environment for innovation creation.”
‘We have to go back to basics’
RIM’s co-CEO and the man who helped build the BlackBerry into a global must-have said there was an urgent need to solve Canada’s innovation problem.
“I have never been more convinced that we need to go back to basics – building capacity for the knowledge economy within our policy community,” said Jim Balsillie, president of the Council of Canadian Innovators and founder of the Center for International Governance Innovation and the Center for Digital Rights.
Here’s a look at ChatGPT’s AI-generated answer to the question “What can AI bring to humanity?” seen on a laptop screen in London earlier this year. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)
He has long been an advocate for better innovation policies in Canada.
“Canada has no chance of an innovation economy until we get our policymakers to understand which way is up,” he wrote in an email to CBC News.
If anything, the global environment has become more challenging than when Balsillie was building BlackBerry. Economists such as Royce Mendes, director of the financial services firm Desjardins, said the pressure on Canada is now even greater.
He points to recent developments around AI and features such as ChatGPT.
“Innovation moves at lightning speed, we have to keep up. We can’t use policies or model the economy the same way we did in the last century; things are very different today,” Mendes told CBC News.
The first step in drawing up an innovation plan is to ensure that policymakers know what innovation means. That may sound simplistic, but most experts agree that politicians don’t always know the difference between invention and innovation.
An invention, Breznitz said, is a new idea, while innovation is about building a market and a support system to encourage more inventions.
‘Innovation is uncertain and risky’
Once that’s settled, the next challenge is convincing Canadian companies to innovate. And Breznitz said that’s harder than you might think.
“Business leaders are not stupid,” he said. “The profit margins of Canadian companies are actually extremely high; innovation is uncertain and risky.”
An environment where companies can make a profit without much risk is bound to struggle with innovation, he said. When you look at Canada’s largest companies, from mining to forestry, from telecommunications companies to banks, there isn’t much competition and the regulatory hurdles are significant, he added.
Companies like Shopify have shown how innovation can drive growth and profit. Financial services companies like WealthSimple have changed the way Canadians think about the banking industry.
Shopify’s Ottawa headquarters is pictured in May 2022. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)
But that level of innovation remains rare in Canada’s elite business circles.
And regulatory hurdles make entrepreneurs think twice before trying to build something in Canada.
Breznitz said an entrepreneur should consider whether they can build a product. Then the entrepreneur has to think about whether customers are going to buy the product. But even if you manage to do both, you still don’t know if you’re allowed to sell that product in Canada.
“So multiple entrepreneurs and companies just don’t bother trying because the uncertainties are so great, including regulatory uncertainty. Or we just move to the US to do that. And they say, excuse my language ‘fk it,” Brenitz said, pointing to regulations in everything from new green technology to financial services preventing companies from even trying to start in Canada.
Mendes agrees that too much regulation can be an obstacle. But he said the real trick is striking a balance, pointing to the banking crisis that wreaked havoc on the US financial system.
“A tough hand on regulation can sometimes protect the Canadian economy: 2008-2009 is a good example of that,” Mendes said. “We need to strike a careful balance between regulation, competitiveness and innovation.”
Despite all the problems, everyone interviewed for this article expressed a strong sense of optimism about the future. They say Canada has great universities that have produced a highly skilled workforce. And slowly, they say, politicians are taking action.
In February, the federal government unveiled the Canada Innovation Corporation, with a hefty budget of $2.6 billion over four years.
The CIC will provide funding ranging from $50,000 to $5 million per project. Large-scale R&D projects can generate as much as $20 million per project.
Deputy Prime Minister and Treasury Secretary Chrystia Freeland ponders a response as she speaks at a press conference before submitting the federal budget earlier this year. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)
Breznitz is announced as the architect of the CIC. He sounds cautiously optimistic about the prospects for success.
“We should see some change in two or three years,” he said. “And then in 15 years we’ll say, ‘Wow, we really did it.’ But it’s a very big if.”
One of the best parts of the BlackBerry movie is watching entrepreneurs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie race to grow and build. Their team is thriving. And the world fell in love with their product.
Policy alone cannot replicate that. But government policies can absolutely put in place systems that help entrepreneurs thrive and reduce failures when they happen.
