Part of a series of features on the tech industry and its impact on commercial vehicles, this piece looks at established firms and start-ups based around Toronto and in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, both situated in southern Ontario, Canada.

Canada – In the 2000s, the word “blackberry” became synonymous with a new kind of phone: the smartphone, a multimedia device capable of more than just taking calls and sending texts. Nowadays, the smartphone is ubiquitous in many places across the world and is a symbol as well as a product of the global economy in which the majority of us live and work. Most phones made today are Apple or Android; none are “blackberries”. But BlackBerry Ltd – a tech company residing in the city of Waterloo in the Canadian province of Ontario – was a pioneer in the design of early smartphone devices and enjoyed a great deal of success before it was edged out of the market by fierce competition from the iPhone and the myriad Android phones towards the end of the 2000s. 

The company’s old management departed in 2012, and Toronto-based investor and majority shareholder Fairfax Financial pumped USD1bn into the failing company and installed John S Chen as CEO to turn its fortunes around. Chen was prepared to do whatever it would take to improve the company’s performance, even if that meant abandoning BlackBerry’s stock-in-trade, the smartphone. An article published on 4 November 2013 by The Globe and Mail described Chen as a “turnaround artist”, somebody uniquely capable of reforming a company otherwise destined for total collapse. In this article, Sean Silcoff writes: