This is what Mike Lazaridis--founder of the company that makes the BlackBerry smart phone--thinks about these ubiquitous tools of modern life:

"We're surrounded by devices that are so sleek and powerful that we're tempted to think it's the machines themselves that are valuable. But the devices are just ideas, made into a form that we can hold in our hands," said Lazaridis, vice chair of the RIM Board of Directors.  "It's the ideas themselves that got us this far. And it's new ideas that will get us even further."



The challenge, Lazaridis said at the 2012 Annual Meeting, is to persuade governments and businesses to invest in ideas without obvious applications--even when practical solutions are needed urgently for a host of global challenges.

"We need to tackle these problems fearlessly--head-on, of course--but realize while we're tackling these things head-on, we also need to support our scientists, our researchers, and our students whose work may seem to have nothing to do with these problems."

"We not only need to fund them imaginatively, we need to have faith that what they're doing is going to be very important, vitally important."

As a show of his own faith, Lazaridis founded the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, Ontario. Researchers in these institutes and others around the world, he suggested, are shaping the planet's future without having a clear sense of what the future will look like or what its citizens will want and need.

He noted that urban planners meeting in New York City for the first time in 1898 were concerned about city streets buried under piles of manure, and couldn't begin to envision a future where the driving force was not horses but Albert Einstein's curiosity about the nature of light.

Predicting and planning for the future isn't any easier now. "If you try to imagine what the impact of the current generation of breakthroughs will be, well, you're going to be wrong," said Lazaridis. "Not only that, you're going to be wrong in a way that will make you look unbelievably conservative."

"If we're blinded by the urgency of our problems, we will go the wrong way," he continued. "We'll be investing in horses, carriages, cleaning up the streets, instead of fostering the research that can give rise to a new technology that's going to change the world."

Lazaridis said creative, hands-on education is key to encouraging a new generation of innovators. His high school shop teacher, he recalled, allowed him to dig into a treasure trove of new lab equipment and machinery only after reading through their operation manuals.  "The manuals and equipment showed me the connection between the abstract science and math concepts I was learning upstairs, and the devices I could touch and do cool stuff with downstairs."

Students should be encouraged to take risks, he said, and "explore the strangest and apparently most useless of ideas."

"And when they explore their ideas for so long that they become scientists, we need to continue to give them the freedom and support to push on into the strange, the apparently useless, the utterly new."