THE BLACKBERRY BOY RESEARCH IN MOTION | CANADA
It's a classic new-economy fable: a university student starts a tech firm in Silicon Valley, never bothers to graduate and goes on to make billions. The only difference between that legend and the true story of Mike Lazaridis, founder of Research in Motion (RIM), is that it took Lazaridis about a decade to come up with his killer idea, and when his epiphany did come, it happened in Canada, not California.
RIM was a little-known company until five years ago, when it launched its BlackBerry, a handheld gadget for writing and receiving secure...