The dude in the skinny black tie
He appears on a plaque, installed in 2011, in RIM’s boardroom: Ernest Davison, a gifted engineer, inventor, mentor, and startup adviser who played a critical role at a critical moment in RIM’s early history. He suggested that RIM co-founder Mike Lazaridis pursue a new way of making electronic circuits, called surface mount technology. He did, and it led to a big contract win with a company called Sutherland-Schultz, pushing RIM to its first $1 million in sales in 1990. Two years later, a young Sutherland-Schultz exec named Jim Balsillie left to join RIM. Davison died in 2010, at the age of 80.