Governor General Michaelle Jean invests Research in Motion President and inventor of the Blackberry, Mike Lazaridis, as an officer into the Order of Canada at a ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, Friday Oct. 6, 2006.(Tom Hanson/Canadian Press)

Just how did a small technology start-up from Waterloo, Ont., surpass the Royal Bank to become Canada's most valuable company? Research in Motion's astounding global success came on the back of one simple product, the BlackBerry, which showed that cellphones could do much more by taking e-mail off the computer and making it mobile.

Founder and co-chief executive officer Mike Lazaridis discussed with CBCNews.ca. how the BlackBerry sparked a revolution in mobility and how current devices are only the tip of the iceberg.

What's your current mobile device and what's your favourite feature on it? I suspect it's a BlackBerry?

You know, you're right — it is a BlackBerry and you know what my favourite feature is? The instantaneous push e-mail. Go figure!

Which model are you using?

I'm currently using an 8320. I get to use it all, but the real problem is no one gives the really new stuff because they're afraid I'm going to show it to somebody. So I at least get the latest released products.

"I don't think we had anywhere near the idea that it would become as big of a hit as it is today and what it's turning into."

— Mike Lazaridis

What is it lacking that you wish it had?

Now you've put me in a box. Some of the things I felt that we could have added in there have actually been released.

The thing we did for e-mail for the corporation and personal information management — calendar and address book — all those things we designed it so that it would work with the back store [servers], whether it's [Microsoft] Exchange, IBM Notes or Novell GroupWise. We made it work with those systems and we extended those systems. We made them more convenient, instantaneous and all those good things, and we added security.

What we are doing with the Mobile Voice System [software now] is that we are extending that capability to the PBX phone, or the business phone. For me, that is the next step in freeing the employee from his desk.

What were you and Jim (Ballsillie) thinking when you were working on the first BlackBerry? Did you have some sort of vision of where this device would take people?

In those early days we both had young children and we'd go home but the work day wouldn't end. We'd be on the phone to each other constantly and there were times when our wives would say, "Why do you even come home? Stay at work, keep talking and come home when you're done." It even got to the point where I bought secure phones for Jim and I. We were starting to use cordless phones so we could spend more time with the kids and play with the kids and not be tethered back with a wire, but of course those phones weren't very secure. So we bought secure cordless phones.

While we were doing this, there were technologies in the office being built for push e-mail and instant messaging and it just struck us that that technology was going to finally free us from being on the phone all night when we should be with our children. In fact, that's exactly what happened — we started taking the prototypes home. We could send the messages back and forth without having to have a vocal conversation, and that was something.

When you're doing that, you're realizing, "Gosh as the world becomes more competitive and people become more ambitious and they spend more and more time working to stay on top of their game and be more successful, wouldn't it be nice if they could stay on top of that data and not go to work the next day to a mountain of e-mail and still be able to go home and move around and go to kids baseballs games and spend time with them in a non-obtrusive way?" That was something we had glimmers of. I don't think we had anywhere near the idea that it would become as big of a hit as it is today and what it's turning into.

How far along on the road are to realizing this vision?

I think we're already there. Things like e-mail, instant messaging, collaboration and internet access are becoming central and accepted as the thing we have do at work. That's how we stay connected, that's how we collaborate, that's how we document and that's how we conduct business, and stay to up to date with all the information that's happening at the internet's speed.

"The bottom line is less and less of the business is happening in your office."

— Mike Lazaridis

What we realized was that a lot of companies need to stay connected in other ways. They need to have a personal relationship with their colleagues and that has to happen in different meeting areas. It might happen in meeting rooms, in someone else's office, it might happen in the cafeteria or on a trip to a client's site or a trip to another country to do business.

The bottom line is less and less of the business is happening in your office. By staying connected and having that secure, always-on, instantaneous connection to all that information frees us to conduct business the way it should be done, more face to face and outside the office, rather than being chained to the office. That was something that was really important.

There's one other thing that's not talked about enough. RIM was the first company to deploy BlackBerry to every employee. We did that in the early days because we wanted an environment to debug the product, we wanted to find all the problems with the product before we shipped it.

We went to great lengths to make sure we had the processes and software in the product so that we could extract that information. More importantly, what we realized was the BlackBerry was allowing all of our employees to stay in touch, so we were able to disseminate information to everyone instantaneously.

They were able to be much more collaborative and we were starting to get a more inclusive environment where more and more teams were talking about issues and involved in decisions.

There was an accurate sense of information flowing through the organization. And of course everything was documented, and we were getting to this point where we were realizing that this was something that was giving us a competitive advantage.

When you look at the success RIM and the BlackBerry have had, you really do have to wonder how much of a role BlackBerry itself being rolled out to every employee had in that success.

How does the BlackBerry and other mobile devices affect the country and the economy on a larger level?

There was this period where our federal government was investing a great deal of money in research and education, and you saw things like the Canada Chair Program, the top-up of indirect research costs, the [Canada Foundation for Innovation] was created and reinvested.

We started to see more investment in granting agencies like [the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada] and large investments in education across the country.

This happened about a decade ago. It's no surprise that we're in a position now where we're starting to see huge surpluses, a strong dollar. There is a direct relationship between investment in the education of our citizens and children and adults … and investments in basic research and applied research that attract the best from around the world.

We have been reaping the benefits of the lifestyle we enjoy here and its attractiveness to researchers, engineers, scientists, marketing people and managers. At RIM alone, we've been importing a lot of management talent from around the world because it is an attractive environment now.

But we cannot work in isolation. All these events are intimately integrated and related. The investments we made a decade ago are having a direct result on our prosperity today. We have to keep that in mind because we must invest and continue to invest the surpluses back into the system that's driving them.

Many credit RIM with getting non-voice mobile services off the ground. What's your attitude about that?

I don't think there's any question that BlackBerry really drove the corporate push e-mail environment and I would have no hesitation in saying we've been innovating continuously in this space.

There have been some killer apps in wireless, the first of which was paging. People forget this. The ability to be told to go to a phone to receive a call — that's how it started. One-way paging that didn't even have a display, it just vibrated or beeped. You'd go and dial in to an operator that would tell you what your message was, and then you'd have to dial the number they gave you after you wrote it down somewhere.

At that point people said, "Why am I doing this?" So the next invention was an alpha-numeric pager and they put in the phone number for you to dial, so you could go to a payphone and dial.

Then they started saying, "Wouldn't it be more convenient if I could dial from wherever I am?" and you started seeing these phones arriving that had big batteries and antennas that you could carry around with you. Of course, people started realizing that this is not just convenient but it's very productive. Then you started seeing the whole cellular revolution and the miniaturization of these handsets.

As time when went on, even the original pagers were replaced by paging functions — the SMS capability — in the early days.

We were working in a parallel environment called two-way wireless data, which of course was far more sophisticated in its use of switching and addressing and messaging technology.

We saw that we could replace the paging function and we could jump on the bandwagon of this enormous opportunity in e-mail. Really, e-mail didn't take off until the late 1990s. It had been around for years at universities and research labs. There were e-mail systems that you could sign on to like AT&T; Easylink and Compuserve and Prodigy, but as a corporate tool it didn't really start taking off until the late 1990s, or about the time that we realized that be extending it to a wireless data environment, we could provide a secure push e-mail experience.

"Our vision that the future will be all smartphones is now being accelerated."

— Mike Lazaridis

You have to remember that's where the value was, this ability to push that information and have it find you rather than you having to log in all the time. To this day, a lot of solutions continue to have this model where although it looks like push, it really isn't. They're dialing in more often or they're getting a little signal saying "you have a message" and they go back and synchronize and connect and it goes back to a session-based model.

To get back to the story, we're working on these sophisticated wireless data networks producing these products that were wireless data only.

We saw the future there with a technology called GPRS, which is a packet-switching overlay that went on top of the global system for mobile (GSM) that was for voice, as well as a little bit of SMS. But of course SMS was never going to replace a full-fledged wireless data system, where you could send all sorts of data, browse the web and do e-mails, documents and attachments.

We focused on that and it was the one area where we really did intercept the future in the broader scale technologies.

We started to look at wireless cellular voice technologies out there and tried to predict which one was going to go data first, and of course GPRS was the first one and arguably we were the first GPRS data device to launch. We launched it in the U.K. with BT Cellnet. There were even areas that shipped that device without even enabling the voice function.

The bottom line was that all this converged together and you look at the killer apps today, they're still voice, texting or instant messaging, ringtones and wallpapers and, in terms of communications, it continues to be e-mail. Even the latest Facebook app for BlackBerry, the main communication element of it is using the e-mail environment and sending and receiving those e-mails.

The BlackBerry made e-mail instant messaging, so to me it's all the same thing when it's in an instantaneous environment.

What do you see mobile devices doing five years from now?

We're just starting to see the success and adoption of these devices around the world. BlackBerrys are less than two per cent of the global market for cellphones, so there's a long way to go before we get to a point where we say, "Now that we've done that, where do we go from here?"

I would say there is a market adoption cycle that's happening and devices like the BlackBerry becoming aspirational brands — where consumers and prosumers are aspiring to a BlackBerry because they're seeing all this excitement and buzz around them — it's a device of choice.

Like other 'aspirational' brands, people do aspire to it but unlike others, the price of the BlackBerry has been coming down so it's becoming affordable to more and more people.

We believe in the future all mobile phones will actually be smart phones — far more sophisticated, integrated, more opportunities to customize and load up with your own applications. With the BlackBerry's 'aspirational' status combined with the amount of money and hype that's been spent on the Apple iPhone, it's a direct attack on consumers.

It's heightening the expectations of a consumer walking into a store looking for a phone. The consumer is now being informed of the potential and benefits and attractiveness of smartphones. Our vision that the future will be all smartphones is now being accelerated.

What's with the rooms named after Lord of the Rings characters at your headquarters in Waterloo, Ont.?

That's just one place. We've come up with names for our boardrooms and meeting rooms all over. For instance in the engineering buildings we've got famous physicists and researchers. In other buildings we've got galaxies and nebulae. We pick a theme for a building. We've even got a building that's got hockey stars in it.