Research in Motion: Dealing with Conflicting Interests

Research in motion: Dealing with conflicting interests

On a sunny summer Sunday in 2010, Mike Lazardis, founder, president and co-chief executive officer at Research in Motion (RIM) gets a coffee from his wife in his home-office. Without having breakfast, Mike went straight to his office that morning to book a flight to Beijing for next week. After entering his personal data, a confirmation button pops up on his screen to confirm the flight. Just before clicking it, Mike sits back in his chair and has a look around his office. Besides the reports from his chief financial officer analyzing the tremendous growth over the last years, the room is filled with notes from his chief technology officer.

Participating in an industry characterized by constant technological innovation through high research and development (R&D) investments from its occupants, RIM has started the process of geographical expansion of R&D activities three years ago. However, new market developments justify the attention to making decisions that could potentially contradict the entrepreneurial roots which made the company so successful. In what way should Mike allocate his R&D spending and where is the trade-off between his initial value proposition and altering it to the industry. This case discusses one of the problems that can arise when business is exploding in a dynamic and fast-changing industry.

Introduction

The first Blackberry was introduced in the late nineties (1999) and is developed by a company named RIM (Research in Motion). RIM is a Canadian company and was started in 1984 in Waterloo. In 1999, when the first BlackBerry entered the market, it created a clear blue ocean. RIM was the first company in the world to create a device which is connected to wireless technology. Before RIM started to produce the Blackberry they worked with Ericsson to improve the wireless email network. This is important to notice because the Blackberry is also famous because it is very user-friendly. RIM has currently 2 mayor products, they are developing wireless technology which they sell to other companies and help to implement this and off course the BlackBerry.

The BlackBerry is a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) which can be used mainly for phoning, texting and mobile internet. The Blackberry can be divided into two different variants: BlackBerry Enterprise and the BlackBerry Internet Services. Both of these variants initially concentrated on businessman because the email-system of the BlackBerry can be integrated into the organizational email-system. Another big advantage with the BlackBerry is that is uses “push email”, which shortly means that it automatically updates incoming messages. So when somebody receives an email it immediately pop-ups at the BlackBerry. The combination of an integrated email-system from