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• Vice-president, Research In Motion Ltd., Waterloo

Patrick Spence displayed some impeccable timing back in 1998. While many of his classmates at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario were going into investment banking, he joined Research in Motion Ltd. (RIM), maker of the now-ubiquitous BlackBerry.

The hand-held communication device was still on the drawing board, and the company employed about 180 people, compared with 7,500 today. "Nobody had heard of the company, so there were a few raised eyebrows. I had to explain why I didn't want to go to London or New York," he recalls.

However, he had spent a spring break at RIM and was convinced he had a future there. He remembers how his classmates were intrigued by the Inter@active Pager, a precursor to the BlackBerry.

"They seemed to start getting it then ... It was a little different [career path] for a business grad."

His choice panned out; over the next decade his career at RIM coincided with the remarkable growth of the BlackBerry, now used by more than 14 million people worldwide.

At first, the company needed to break new ground. Mr. Spence, who began as a product manager, helped accomplish that when he successfully targeted the Inter@active Pager to the financial services community. In 2000, within a year of the launch of the BlackBerry, he and his team had landed major deals with clients such as Merrill Lynch and Fidelity Investments.

"RIM is a large company, but it has an entrepreneurial environment," he says. "I was able to use [its] resources and was given a lot of leeway to do what we had to do to become successful."

Then he took another unorthodox step. He moved to the company's information technology side and, as senior manager of customer implementations, helped develop RIM's enterprise resource-planning system, covering its entire operations, from finance to manufacturing.

In 2002, he moved to Melbourne, Australia; as vice-president, Asia-Pacific, he focused on developing relationships with telecommunications carriers in Hong Kong, India and Australia. On his return two years later, he continued to oversee that region's growth for about a year and then became vice-president responsible for RIM's largest carriers in North America.

He says one of the most exciting developments is the way lower-cost versions of the BlackBerry, such as the Pearl, have taken off; they now account for about 30 per cent of the subscriber base.

"We are still in the early days," says Mr. Spence, a father of two who recently took up marathon running. "More consumers want real-time access to e-mail or instant messaging or social networking."

Special to The Globe and Mail