1. Be entrepreneurial
German immigrants created a New Berlin of hard work and self-reliance out of the Southwestern Ontario countryside of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. "The early history of Berlin was all entrepreneurial," says Charles Greb, whose second-generation immigrant grandfather started a shoe-making business in 1910 — just before Berlin's name was changed to Kitchener during the First World War. Successive waves of immigrants built on this pro-business foundation, even as the old family companies closed down or evolved into something new. Mr. Greb, 76, was once operations boss at the family shoe company, whose products included Kodiak boots, Hush Puppies and Bauer skates. Today, shoe making is gone from Waterloo Region, and Mr. Greb, an investor and corporate director, has gone through several careers since the family company was sold in 1975. But he has few regrets about the loss of the family's manufacturing legacy. The entrepreneurial spirit lives on — in son Ross's services company, Greb Tele-Data, which sells telephone systems from an office on Shoemaker Street in Kitchener. "Things evolve," says Mr. Greb, who sees shoe making as an ideal industry for low-wage developing countries. As for Ross, 52, his only disappointment is that the family surrendered its skate business. He figures he is a salesman at heart, and could have made a nice career out of selling skates to Canada's hockey addicts.
2. Innovate
Brad Siim, 38, is poster boy for the Waterloo Way. He is one of five co-founders of Sandvine, a five-year-old tech startup that has just gone public on the London Stock Exchange, raising $37-million. This is actually Mr. Siim's second foray into high-tech moguldom since graduating from the University of Waterloo almost 15 years ago. The computer engineer was co-founder of PixStream, a Waterloo venture that he and an earlier configuration of partners sold to Cisco Systems for $369-million (U.S.) in 1999. (It was closed down two years later when Cisco retrenched.) PixStream spawned a spinoff of its own, called Kaparel. In each case, Mr. Siim surrounded himself with the classic recipe: Tech brains from the computer-mad University of Waterloo and business smarts from Wilfrid Laurier University, which sports a large commerce program. (The other key ingredient in each case was a timely investment by Sir Terence Mathews, Canada's telecom billionaire.) Unlike many Waterloo startups, Sandvine's network intelligence products are not the direct result of research undertaken at the University of Waterloo. But Mr. Siim is convinced that the university, along with WLU and Conestoga College, lie at the heart of why people build companies here. He is a serial entrepreneur who has been in on the start of three companies, and will be involved in more. The educational institutions are like anchor tenants in a shopping mall of creativity, he says — they are magnets for new ideas and new ventures.
3. Network business and educators
In the 1950s, there was Gerald Hagey. In the 2000s, there is Mike Lazaridis. You can draw a straight line between these two business leaders who pulled together public-private collaborations with the dream of putting Waterloo on the intellectual map. The late Mr. Hagey was a sales manager for Goodrich who, along with other local business leaders, conceived of a new-style Canadian university founded on engineering and math. He was the first president of the new University of Waterloo in the late 1950s and 1960s, and the key figure in breeding 250 to 300 spinoff companies that in their current variations, generate almost $1-billion in annual revenue. The university evolved into a computer science powerhouse, which attracted bright young people. One of those was Mr. Lazaridis, who dropped out of school in the 1980s just shy of graduation to run his own company, Research In Motion. But he had soaked up all the computing tools the university offered, including a precursor of today's e-mail. Years later, Mr. Lazaridis hit on a gadget called the BlackBerry that provides wireless e-mail — and it changed the world. Now, he is tackling something even more ambitious — a Waterloo big-idea complex that can predict "the science of the future." Working with governments, he has given $100-million to the new Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and $50-million to the Institute for Quantum Computing. "We have passionately invested personal money into it," Mr. Lazaridis says of his science dream. As with Mr. Hagey's university, it could be the seed of Waterloo's next flowering of wealth creation.
