EE Times: Tell us the story of the Blackberry.
Mike Lazaridis: It's a long story that starts off in high school [in the late 1970s]. I had the privilege of being taught by an amazing teacher who was an electrician and president of the local ham radio group. He ran an electronics shop that received an endowment from a local industrialist in Windsor, Ontario.

We had a whole bunch of great equipment there. That's where I got an acceleration of my interest in electronics. I got a chance to play with the latest equipment from DEC, signal generators from HP. I got the run of the shop.

When I arrived, there were just boxes. When I asked if I could open them, he said, "There's just one rule. You have to read the manuals first." So that year I read a lot of manuals and opened up every single box.

He used to let us work in the lab at night while he marked papers. He let us work on old UHF tuners. The wireless work stuck with me.

He took me aside one day and he said, "Don't get too seduced by computers because it will be a combination of computers and wireless that will really change things." He was prescient. He was talking about a future that wouldn't come to pass for 25 years.

At the University of Waterloo [Ontario], I was exposed to the beginnings of networks and e-mail before anyone new what LANs were. What I didn't realize was I was playing with technology that would change the world 20 years later.

When I started RIM [in 1984], I had an e-mail address I used extensively. I would hand my card to executives and they would ask, "What's an e-mail address," because I had two of them on my card. I would ask them, "What's a telex number?" In 10 years, we converged on using faxes.

In 1987, I heard in a conference someone talking about setting up wireless data networks to support a fleet of Coca-Cola trucks serving vending machines in Japan. That's when the comment from my high school teacher jumped into my memory about wireless computing changing the world.

We started investing everything we had in wireless data. We wrote some of the first APIs, e-mail programs and gateways.

EET: So education goes a long way to foster innovation.
Lazaridis: Absolutely, people underestimate the value of universities in bringing students up to speed with technologies that won't hit the mainstream for another decade or two.

EET: So how did you get to the Blackberry?
Lazaridis: Between 1989 and 1991, we experimented with wireless e-mail with Ericsson and AT&T. The push aspect of what we were doing was far more compelling than dialing in to get e-mail.

The first product we put out used an HP 95LX [palmtop computer] connected to an Ericsson Mobidem [mobile radio modem] that looked like a large phone with an antenna and no headset. We wrote client and gateway software to send and receive e-mail from it. That became Ericsson's Viking Express. We realized how compelling it was as a solution.

We kept working on that and eventually wrote our own radio software and partnered with Intel on next-generation silicon to produce a wireless PCMCIA Type II card for the HP 100 and 200LX. You could get e-mail anywhere in North America. But we still thought it was too big.

We came up with a prototype that was large compared to a pager. Intel came back to us and said they could integrate it more so we embarked on a project to put essentially everything in a single chip and run it off an AA battery. The challenge was enormous. It had a full QWERTY keyboard, four-line display, track wheel UI and had a battery life of 23 days. That was the Interactive Pager 950.

We launched it as an enterprise solution for Microsoft Exchange in 1999, and that was when we called it the Blackberry.

EET: And now some 4 million people use it! You also earned a technical Emmy. What's the story behind that?
Lazaridis: I got the opportunity to work with the National Film Board of Canada and Kodak to automate motion picture editing. At the time, we were using laser diodes and optical sensors that were new and barcode technology that wasn't designed for motion picture film. It was a giant engineering challenge.

We came up with an innovative design and patented it. It became a standard called Digi-Synch. It took days out of the editing process, compressing some jobs down to about 20 minutes. We got a technical Emmy and Oscar for that work. Later the technology was used to time code and synch film to video so you could do off-line editing. At one point we had close to 90 percent market share. We plowed all that money back into wireless.

EET: What do you think are the next big trends in mobile?
Lazaridis: The miniaturization and sophistication are relentless. The parts have gotten so small in my career you can no longer assemble them by hand. The whole thing is automated.

As for the level of sophistication, just look at 3-D modeling, circuit simulation and modeling today. The level of sophistication is amazing in going straight to CAD where designs go right to manufacturers for circuit boards, they go right to the production line where parts are placed by robots and inventory is computerized.

All this means devices will get more and more sophisticated and complex, but the good ones, the ones that provide a compelling experience, are the ones that operate like magic. They just arrive, set themselves up automatically, are completely secure and reliable. You can activate 99 percent of their functions with a roller wheel and a skate button. The UI tries to pick what you want to do next.

EET: What's RIM's strategy now that the whole cell phone world is getting into wireless e-mail?
Lazaridis: We've been building this company for scale. We make sure we are producing a profit and have margins where others can't stay in the business. And we're relentless about investing in people, technology and research.

This is a long-term business; 3G radio stacks is a long-term business. The ante to get into that is tremendous. It can take six years to write a compelling radio stack, learn and master the 3G chip sets and then go through testing to get certified on 120 networks around the world. It's a major undertaking and a long-term strategy that requires constant innovation and a lot of business and technical discipline.

EET: How does RIM avoid becoming just another handset maker?
Lazaridis: We have a multifaceted strategy. We support all major enterprise e-mail systems. We support instant messaging and browsing and wireless downloads. We also run a private IP network that connects all the networks together for our customer base so they don't have to worry what carrier they will use. It also provides a security model that can only come through out network control system.

Then there are our handsets. Even our least technically sophisticated users can understand how to user the Blackberry in a few minutes. People see it as a privilege to get a Blackberry.

Then we have our licensing programs. We have licensed technology to basically all the top manufacturers of Pads and cell phones. And we are working with top-tier companies like Intel and Qualcomm for supporting their chip sets. There is so much going on.

EET: What have you learned about the nature of disruptive innovation and how to foster it?
Lazaridis: I believe the clue lies in our university system. The university environment is a special fertile ground where students are exposed to technology they take for granted that becomes the game changers decades out. By learning about something early and getting involved in it in a meaningful way there is a good chance they will come up with something that will change the way people do business or entertain themselves.

You need to remind people what they did in school is something the current generation of users doesn't fully appreciate or fully understand, and they shouldn't take it for granted. Today, I really appreciate bright people, and make sure they have the tools, labs and resources to excel and come up with really cool things.