Five years ago, Jim Balsillie put down his BlackBerry, stepped back from his e-mail and took a broad look at the world.
His assessment of "the most important and perplexing issue of our time" was different from what most Canadians would likely come up with. The number one issue was not poverty, not AIDS, not terrorism, not even nuclear proliferation.
Rather it was the mechanism the world uses for dealing with these and many other problems, which in his eyes had grown outdated and ineffective. "The world is orders of magnitude more integrated than 60 years ago, and the institutions that manage and support and guide and protect the direction of the world haven't evolved to keep pace," says the chairman and co-chief executive officer of Research In Motion Ltd.
The United Nations, for example, is still designed primarily to protect borders, even though the world's problems today are less about sovereignty disputes and more about pandemics, genocide and terrorism. And whether it's a distant think tank or an international financial body, most of the institutions have failed miserably to adopt technology, he says.
"More technology goes into building a car door than goes to reforming global institutions."
His answer was to found the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), investing $20-million of his own money and persuading his business partner and co-CEO, Mike Lazaridis, and the Ontario government to invest tens of millions more.
The organization combines elements of a traditional think tank with those of a hungry high-tech startup, mixing academics and former diplomats with technologists bent on changing the world.
Mr. Balsillie, 45, is best known as the public face of RIM's BlackBerry. He is the business whiz who has complemented Mr. Lazaridis's engineering smarts since 1992, when the pair teamed up to create one of the nation's most successful technology players.
Mr. Lazaridis has been receiving growing notoriety among scientists for his organization, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, which he opened in October, 2000, after committing $100-million of his money to the cause.
Both organizations are down the road from RIM headquarters in Waterloo, Ont. While Mr. Lazaridis's ties to the Perimeter Institute trace clearly to his well-known passion for physics, Mr. Balsillie's desire to start his own think tank is harder to explain. Why would a chartered accountant with an MBA from Harvard University, who is supercompetitive and highly active, want to tie himself to retired diplomats and academics?
Part of it comes from a general interest in political economics and part from being a fierce patriot who believes Canada has more to offer on international policy. But there is also the belief that technology can be used to improve lives.
Housed in the old Seagram's museum, CIGI has developed a research portal on the Web that seeks to link international policy specialists around the world, from academics at Princeton University to non-government organizations working in sub-Sahara Africa.
More than 100 organizations pool their content through CIGI on a portal called IGLOO (cigionline.org/igloo/).
The Web technology gives academics and anyone else involved in international affairs the ability to publish material in designated on-line communities without the need of any special technical skills.
IGLOO is involved in a project to prepare and host the personal documents of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan after he retires at the end of the year, says Dan Latendre, CIGI's chief information officer.
Last month, Mr. Balsillie completed a deal to form a merger of sorts between CIGI and Canada's oldest think tank, the Canadian Institute of International Affairs (CIIA). The arrangement pumps needed cash into CIIA's coffers and gives CIGI control of CIIA's library of international material. The 78-year-old collection will be housed at CIGI's headquarters and digitized so it can be accessed on-line.
John MacNaughton, chairman of CIIA, calls Mr. Balsillie "a clear-thinking, get-it-done kind of visionary" who wants to strengthen Canada's role on the world stage.
"A lot of Canadians who have had success I don't think have been as passionate or committed to lifting Canada along with their successes," Mr. MacNaughton says.
Mr. Balsillie calls it "staggeringly criminal" that in the U.S. individuals will fight to get on the board of the Council of Foreign Relations, but in Canada there has been a reluctance to help Canada's pre-eminent foreign relations think tank.
"The incremental funding CIIA needed to be vibrant every year is [equivalent to] a decent boathouse renovation," he says. "As a country, we have a history of boxing above our weight category. But arguably [we have] not really [been] boxing to our weight category in the last few years."
If the apparent complacency of many Canadians leaves Mr. Balsillie concerned, it doesn't cause him to doubt his vision for CIGI.
"I don't think of that. I just frame my own view of what I want to do and what I want to believe."
Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics
An independent, resident-based research institute devoted to foundational issues in theoretical physics
Biggest financial supporters
RIM's Mike Lazaridis $100-million
Government of Ontario $75-million
Government of Canada $30-million
RIM's Jim Balsillie and Doug Fregin $10-million each
Areas of research: Foundations of quantum theory, quantum gravity, superstring theory, particle physics, cosmology
Staffing: 49 resident researchers, with plans to host 300 scientists this year
Centre for International Governance Innovation
Address the challenges associated with how world
governments and international organizations interact across boundaries. Raise Canada's capacity to effect change in public policy domestically and around the world.
Biggest financial supporters:
Government of Canada $30-million
Jim Balsillie $20-million
Mike Lazaridis $10-million
Government of Ontario $7.5-million (Igloo)
Areas of research: Emerging economies, UN reform,
reshaping of diplomacy, international health governance
Staffing: 60
