CIOIN

“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.” – Steve Jobs

Taking a leaf from Jobs’ book, Thorsten Heins, CEO and president of RIM, wants to move on from past mistakes and make innovation the company’s core. 

“Never lose the innovation spirit,” he said as he took over the reins of the troubled company this week. 

In a video blog on Blackberry’s site, Heins spoke about the need to innovate and launch new products that will keep RIM relevant to enterprise customers. He said that the company needs to talk to its customers and set the right expectations. 

Calling himself a performance driven person, he believes that the company would revive the Playbook and ship new smartphones, like the Blackberry 10, later this year. “We want to make this experience a blow-your-socks-off experience for our enterprise customers,” he said.

He also hopes to see RIM become one of the top three players in wireless technology. That’s going to be quite a task.  Since June last year, RIM’s stocks have dropped to its lowest. While in October, millions of BlackBerry devices were left without e-mail, Internet and instant messaging service due to infrastructure failure. It hasn’t been able to reclaim its top position even with the launch of Playbook in September. 

Worse, owing to investor pressure, RIM’s founders Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, resigned on Saturday as co-chairmen and co-chief executives of RIM. With a team of 75 million base worldwide, Heins’ is pinning his hopes on innovation to rebuild and revive RIM in the next decade.