When it comes to tech titans in Waterloo Region, none stand taller than BlackBerry and its CEO, Thorsten Heins.
Judging by the task in front of him, Heins will need all six feet, six inches of his well-noted height to keep a clear eye on the future for the embattled company best known for its smartphones.
That perception – of BlackBerry as a smartphone company – is about to change, if Heins can steer Canada’s best-known technology company into the new era of growth he envisions.
I had a chance to sit down with Heins for an interview (see accompanying video) immediately after his keynote speech at Communitech’s recent Tech Leadership Conference.
As you’ll see, Heins is well-positioned to talk about tech leadership, given the situation he confronted when he took the reins at what was then Research In Motion in early 2012, and the sweeping changes he has led at the company since then.
While my former media colleagues have fixated on the short-term prospects of the new BlackBerry 10 smartphones – and the implied (but dubious) winner-take-all race between the new phones and those running on Android and iOS – they have glossed over what I think is the more interesting aspect of what Heins said in his TLC speech, and again during our chat: that BlackBerry is looking past the smartphone and gunning to become the world’s dominant mobile computing platform.
“We have had 25 years of mobile communications, evolving and evolving, and now I truly believe we’re on the verge of something really great and big,” Heins said to the TLC crowd. This big thing, he suggested, “will again change the way we work, it will change the way we communicate, but it will also change the way we compute.”
Heins sketched out a vision of BlackBerry as the platform for people’s “personal computing power,” one that connects to everything from their cars and homes to their health care.
“That is a huge paradigm shift that we’re all about to embark into,” he told the audience.
During our chat afterward, Heins was relaxed and animated as he reiterated his intent to lead BlackBerry into an evolution of its mission beyond smartphones, which he called “just a hardware expression of mobile computing.”
While smartphones are an admittedly “big segment,” Heins said “it’s a mature market by now,” and that BlackBerry already has other elements in place – its secure, global data network, for example – on which to build something much more sweeping in scope.
“I want to be in this mobile computing domain,” he told me. “I don’t know yet exactly what that means five years down the road, but we’ve got to get on that path, and that’s what we’re doing with some really interesting innovation projects that we are running within BlackBerry today.”
We can’t wait to see where this leads.
In the meantime, give a listen to what Heins has to say in the video, not just about mobile computing, but about how he managed the media storm of the past year, what he’s learned about leadership, and how he’s changing the culture inside BlackBerry to make it “a lean, mean hunting machine.”
Anthony Reinhart is Communitech's senior staff writer. View from the 'Loo is a weekly look at the issues, people and events that shape Waterloo Region's technology sector.
