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black-and-white photograph taken by a local newspaper of the young entrepreneurs, still very much Boy Electricians, remains a timeless portrait of innovators who misunderstood their market.
    At the center of the photograph is a glass case with two televisions. One reads, “Advertise On Me - I Attract Customers,” the other, “The Budgie System.” Perched on top of the second TV set is a stuffed bird. To the left of the display, Shaw and Fregin join together, unsmiling, clad in plaid (Fregin) and a rumpled T-shirt (Shaw). To the right stands Lazaridis, at twenty-three sporting premature gray hairs, wearing an oxford shirt, V-neck sweater, and khaki plants. Clutching a vinyl briefcase and staring confidently into the camera, Lazaridis appears oblivious to a group of female shoppers gathered behind him. No one notices that the stand-in budgie is actually a toy parrot. Instead they are sifting through a large box of discounted goods placed in the hall by a nearby retailer.
    In an unintended nod to the many lessons they had yet to learn about running a business, Lazaridis and Fregin formally registered their new company under the name Research In Motion Ltd. on March 7, 1984.

2 ENCHANTED FOREST
    Mike Lazaridis strode with purposeful confidence into an office tower on Eglinton Avenue in Toronto. He and Mike Barnstijn, a new Research In Motion partner, were hopeful that a meeting with a potential client would bring some badly needed luck. It was late 1989, five years after Lazaridis and Doug Fregin founded RIM. Their inaugural Budgie communicators never took flight because businesses didn’t share the designers’ excitement about the bulky digital advertising system. At the time RIM was surviving by designing electronic components in a berth above a Waterloo bagel store. It had a run making computerized digital display boards for General Motors Corp. and circuit boards for factory equipment. It even created automated bar code readers for film-editing machines that would later earn RIM Oscar and Emmy technical awards. The innovations were promising, but buyers were scarce. Cash was so low that Barnstijn was sometimes paid in RIM stock. If the pressure was getting to Lazaridis, he never let it show. He was not one to dwell on finances or grow nervous if products fell behind schedule. The schoolboy who fixed every mess at W. F. Herman high school, no matter how difficult, approached business setbacks as temporary problems. “There is always another life raft,” was his mantra.
    The raft of the day was Rogers Cantel Inc., a cellphone company controlled by Canada’s cable pioneer, Ted Rogers. Having amassed a fortune feeding cable TV to Canadian homes in the 1970s and 1980s, Rogers had a habit of recruiting big thinkers who might deliver the next lucrative electronicbreakthrough. One of Rogers’ sages, an irreverent Brit who parlayed a chemistry degree into a mobile phone career, was seated in the middle of a warren of cubicles, smoothing a plush mustache, when Lazaridis and Barnstijn strolled in the door. David Neale was technically in charge of marketing at Rogers Enhanced Radio Group. More accurately, he was the Pied Piper to a team of employees known internally as the Enchanted Radio Group. The team tinkered with radio components and antennas and dreamed of data that could be carried over radio waves to mobile products. Could computers be refitted to fire messages and documents on radio signals to mobile couriers, salespeople, and other footloose professionals? Engineers and ham radio innovators experimented for years with text messages on radio waves. No one, however, had translated the breakthroughs into a viable business.
    “No one believed we would amount to anything,” says Neale. “Can you imagine a group of people who had been drawn together for the purpose of creating something, but weren’t sure what it was? I was supposed to think up what that was.”
    Rogers enlisted RIM to assess recently purchased