The Future of One of Canada's Major Tech Hubs

Just a few days after BlackBerry announced that thousands of its staff would lose their jobs, Google's Motorola announced that it would be establishing a new engineering hub in the Kitchener-Waterloo area.

On this week's PROFIT BusinessCast, Derek Phillips, engineering director of Motorola Mobility Canada, explains that the plan isn't to prey on BlackBerry's leftovers; it's to take advantage of all that the region has to offer as a tech hub—one that includes BlackBerry. "It's good for Kitchener-Waterloo for all the companies [in the area] to be doing well," he says. "It's important that we have a strong tech community."

The engineering hub is part of Motorola's increased focus on R&D. "Where Motorola as a company has been successful before is innovating in the hardware space," says Phillips. "Where [Motorola] will be successful in long term is developing the software that makes our innovative hardware shine."

When Google acquired Motorola Mobility in August, it released a statement asserting: "Google is great at software; Motorola Mobility is great at devices. The combination of the two makes sense and will enable faster innovation."

So far, the tech community sees Motorola mostly as a liability to Google. Phillips is confident that the big ideas (and results) from Motorola are still to come, and that they'll come out of this new engineering hub.

How will the tech coming out of Motorola's new engineering hub be different from a Google Android product? What are the firms' key measurements for success? And what does it all mean for the tech community in Canada?