Jim Balsillie
speaker
218 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jim Balsillie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
We have brilliant innovators. We have brilliant researchers. We come up with earth-changing ideas.
So the number three AI research center in the world is in Edmonton. Number five is in Toronto. We gave essentially all that away to other US tech companies. I think Trump has made a strategic mistake because America's got an unbelievable deal from Canada.
Sure, and it's great to be with you. Yeah, we've known each other for 15 years. You were also my wife's professor 25 years ago when there were nine students in your class. So, my gosh, what a journey. Congratulations for you. For me, with RIM...
yes prodigies yeah uh so so with me with rim uh it's the greatest i mean first of all uh i believe capitalism is the in a liberal democracy is the best form for human flourishing in the world and and i'm an ardent fan of capitalism entrepreneurship technology innovation
And that created the framework for me to be partners with Mike Lazaridis as co-CEOs to create Blackberry, something we took that really globalized the smartphone, grew it from an idea to $20 billion in over 150 countries around the world. And it's remarkable, you prosper beyond your wildest dreams. You change the world and you also learn how the world works.
And I very quickly learned and had very good mentors in the United States that the way I'd been explained how the economy works is very, very different than the way it works in the ground. And so that's what shaped my experience at RIM. As I said, we grew it to...
I retired at the end of 2011 when we had 5.2 billion in revenue on a $20 billion year and moved on to other things and Mike stayed with it. So yeah, that was my experience.
And also do, most of my time is still with my businesses around the world. I spend two thirds to three quarters of my time with my businesses in North America, tech and other, and in Europe and the Middle East. So yeah, most of my, I'm still fundamentally a businessman.
Sure, sure. And again, I come at this as an ardent capitalist, so I'm going to explain how capitalism works and Canada's issue in this and why the US and other like-type economies have thrived so much in this changed era.
The traditional economy is a production economy where you manufacture goods and you produce them with efficiency and scale and you sell them at a positive margin and you fundamentally compete on cost. And the purpose of trade agreements was to get rid of friction of moving those products or what are called tariffs or border adjustments. And that's the traditional economy.
And Canada does that pretty well. It set up foreign branch plants. They brought technology. They brought machinery. They brought capital. They brought management. And when you set up these plants... They create domestic supply chains. They create upskilling of workers. They create domestic tax base.
And you get lots of these positive spillovers and the headquarters gets good performance and everything works great. And that was Canada's prosperity. Canada had tremendous prosperity post-World War II, really up until the early 1990s. About 30 years ago, the US culminated a multi-year effort to birth the knowledge-based economy of intellectual property.
And so this culminated with putting in the NAFTA agreement, extensive intellectual property provisions in 1994, But also in the World Trade Organization, the U.S. led a five-year exercise to globalize intellectual property rights. And it was called TRIPS, the Trade-Related Aspects for Intellectual Property Systems, I think something like that. And so the world shifted to...
amassing IP assets and collecting a rent. So it stopped being a production-based economy only, and it became a two-legged race, liberalizing markets, capital, and labor through production economy, Ricardian comparative advantage of making things, to a parallel race of enclosing knowledge, using agreements to spread friction and monopoly to capture a rent based on an idea.
And that's interesting because that's at the time we were also doing Blackberry. And my mentors in commercialization were in the U.S. and helping me in Washington and all the different things we had to do to navigate. But I think the original sin in Canada was in 1994. Early 1994, Canada signed two agreements. The NAFTA agreement with extensive intellectual property provisions, which was new.
and the TRIPS agreement of the World Trade Organization, which was the globalization of the IP system. But what's interesting is domestically in Canada, later that year, they published a book called The Orange Book. Who was they? Industry Canada, the government of Canada. It published an orange book, and you can see it on the web, called Building a More Innovative Canada.
And this is six months after we signed these two treaties. And they talk about innovation is all about jobs.
And they make no reference to the two IP treaties that were the underpinning of innovation that they signed earlier that year.
They didn't know a revolution had occurred. Right.
So that's the original sin.
Showing 1–20 of 218 · page 1 of 11
Next →