Those who know me know that I was never a huge fan of BlackBerry smartphones. I’ve always been a multimedia person and after extensive business discussions with them in 2005 – 2007 where they did not feel the need to build multimedia into their product plans, I gave up on them.
However, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t feel a pang of pain when I saw that they were shutting down their “Center for Excellence”. Anytime we see companies shutting down innovation centers, it makes me depressed. Perhaps it’s my fear that big companies are not interested in innovation anymore and merely see innovation as the area of start-ups and when time is ripe, they would then acquire. While that is a viable model and one that works well, it also does not take into consideration some interesting products came out of large innovation centers such as Bell Labs?
BlackBerry shuts the doors on its “Center for Excellence” (via Pando Daily)
On October 10, 2013Months after it opened, BlackBerry has officially closed down its “Center for Excellence.” The company had opened the center last February in conjunction with the local government to support and protect tech jobs in the city of…