Do you miss your BlackBerry? Canada's innovation sector does too

The new movie BlackBerry is a celebration of the much beloved phone. It stars Hollywood actors and gives a behind-the-scenes sense of the rise and fall of the Waterloo, Ont.-based company RIM.

But under all that, it's a love letter to innovation. The BlackBerry changed how we work, how we live and how we communicate.

"How profoundly important the innovation that these nerds above a diner in Waterloo in 1996 came up with," the movie's star, Jay Baruchel, told CBC News at a recent red carpet event.

It's easy to look back at the spectacular rise and fall of BlackBerry and focus on the fall. But Baruchel wanted to make a movie that celebrated the rise — and the way one small Canadian company changed the world.

"The way that we participate in the world, the way that we relate to one another, all of it stands on the shoulders of what they created, for better or worse," Baruchel said. 

"They've toiled in anonymity for long enough. And I want people to know that we innovate and hustle and make as much shit as anybody else." 

The rise of BlackBerry showed Canada is as well placed as any country on earth to build and engineer new technologies. Those engineers above a diner in Waterloo created an entirely new product class. At the same time, just outside Ottawa, engineers at Nortel were breaking similarly important ground.

When they eventually failed, there was no system in place to support the ideas, and the work that was still being done.

"In a system where you have the correct kind of innovation policy and real innovation environment, the demise of both (RIM and Nortel) would have immediately created a massive amount of small companies which could quickly scale up," said Dan Breznitz.

He's the chair of Innovation Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He's also the co-director of the Innovation Policy Lab and a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR).

He points to Silicon Valley in the U.S. When Sun Microsystems collapsed in the wake of the dot-com bubble, dozens of smaller companies were positioned to fill the void. 

"Look where Apple and Google headquarters are now. They sit on the old Sun campus," he said. 

But as Canada's tech giants toppled, there was nothing to emerge from the wreckage.

"In Canada, they just disappeared. If you actually look at many of the best resources that used to belong to Nortel, and BlackBerry, they belong now to Huawei," Breznitz told CBC News. "That's a clear indication of a horrific failure of innovation policy and a really horrific environment for the creation of innovation."