Articles for Entrepreneurs
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Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis are the co-CEOs of Canada’s superstar, Research In Motion Inc. (aka RIM), producer of the BlackBerry®. Mike started RIM in 1984 and Jim joined in 1992 to help grow RIM into the company it is today in 2007 with $3 billion in revenue and 7,000+ employees. This interview with Jim Balsillie was done in 2001 when RIM was a mere 1,000 employees. While the interview is now 7 years old, it is a treasure of rare insight into the ideas that have fuelled RIM’s past and recent growth. It’s an interview all true entrepreneurs will appreciate: it is Jim speaking candidly and at length about his approach to vision formulation, planning, organizational design, hiring and employee motivation.
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Innovation is a requirement for survival and success. Faced with limited resources, small and medium-sized companies have discovered that teaming up in collaborative innovation projects can have its advantages. This article presents 6 types of collaborative situations to consider, and explores the factors that make collaborative R&D and commercialization succeed or fail.
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The TV show Dragon’s Den features Canadian entrepreneur hopefuls pitching business ideas to angel investors called the Dragons. The source of the show’s controversy has been the sometimes scary interaction between entrepreneurs and Dragons, as well as the sometimes poor quality business ideas that appear to be for TV entertainment purposes only. The question Cool Companies magazine wanted to know was: Is the Dragon’s Den serious in offering real value to Canada’s entrepreneur community or is it taking advantage of want-to-be entrepreneurs for TV entertainment? To investigate, we asked 3 groups with different perspectives: entrepreneurs that appeared on the show this season, a Dragon, and Canada’s experienced and successful Canadian entrepreneurs who read Cool Companies magazine.
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It has become a meaningless cliché, but it has never been more relevant. So what exactly is a socially responsible company? It is more than one that recycles its garbage! Jill Bamburg has researched 30 companies that describe themselves as socially responsible and finds that profit is only part of the mix for them. They are mission-driven. They have a triple bottom line – people, profit and planet. As she explains in her book, Getting to Scale, there are 9 characteristics of mission-driven companies that make them different from profit-driven companies.
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There is no doubt that a company and its CEO must evolve for the company to survive and grow. Are there common milestones of growth? We present a research study of high-growth Ontario companies that suggests there are. The stages of growth are marked by employee size: 10, 20, 30, 50, 100, 100+ employees. We take a look at the characteristics of each stage and the milestones the company needs to reach before they enter the next stage. Entrepreneurs of high growth companies from across Canada comment on their growth experiences.
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New research has found that, of all the factors that influence the success of an entrepreneurial company, there is one that dominates: the creativity of the entrepreneur driving the company. Why? Because many times along its journey, an entrepreneurial company finds itself stuck between a rock and hard place, and it takes a lot of creativity to figure its way out. Entrepreneurial creativity has several dimensions that we touch on briefly. Surprisingly, there is currently no conclusive evidence that business education, best practices and business plans are significant determinants in entrepreneurial success.
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The Waterloo Region in Ontario is home to innovation rockstars like RIM, and it is a hive of entrepreneurial activity. There’s something special going on there.
