The collision of creative minds at Nortel Networks Corp. in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was known as Northern Telecom, helped the telecom giant grow, as the DMS-100 - the first major digital switch for telephones - hit the market and demand exploded.
But at times, recalled Purple Forge founder and Nortel alumnus Brian Hurley, sometimes the creative would get turned into the wacky.
"One guy, the head of my group, was convinced that everybody in the government was against him, because the government wouldn't let him have his guns," he said.
"That individual, I remember going to a meeting at a different location and we had to put our badges through strip readers. And so he goes over, and he swipes his badge, doesn't work. Swipes it again, doesn't work."
A little peeved, the man walked over to the security desk to get the badge fixed. When the security guard took the badge away and explained the Bell-Northern Research manager would have to get another one, things deteriorated quickly.
"(My colleague) said 'No, I have to have my badge back,' and started shouting at him. Then he leaped over the bench to grab the security guard."
On to overseas
More commonly, however, the taste for competition helped Northern and its independent jointly owned research arm, BNR, stay on top of the burgeoning demand for communications products.
"Nortel had a lot of fundamental work going on in component technology," said Pat DiPietro, who held a number of managerial roles at Nortel prior to joining venture firm VG Partners in 2001.
"Today you will buy components, but in those days you designed components ... I mean integrated circuits, which are those very fundamental building blocks of telecom. Today you buy those from Intel or Marvel or Broadcom. But in those days, we designed them ourselves."
In the late 1980s, Northern also refocused its product lines and research to reflect one "message" across several platforms, such as the Digital World initiative in 1986 to create the first end-to-end digital network.
As the company moved into digital telephony communications, new CEO Paul Stern decided in 1989 that Northern had to play big to compete against the telecommunications giants of the time, such as AT & amp;T.
So Northern and BNR embarked on a path of rapid expansion. International customers and offices soon became the order of the day. A takeover of the U.K.'s STC was negotiated, exciting former engineers such as David Mann.
"(Northern) had a Pandora's box of all sorts of different things; for an engineer, different things you could take advantage of," he said, noting the push towards optical networking and British expertise in that area was what had attracted Northern's attention.
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Research labs also opened up in places such as China and the Soviet Union.
After then-Soviet Union premier Boris Yeltsin went on a tour of Northern in 1993, the senior-level officials from his country were so impressed that they offered business with one of their government labs.
"The reason was two-fold," recalled Diane Livshits, who now runs Krumpers Solar Solutions but used to work as a Russian translator for Northern.
"One, it was a good entry point into that market and two, the level of human resources available were highly trained and financially very lucrative."
What's more, the slow collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s had left these government labs without the financing they were used to from the military - encouraging the people in charge to look abroad for cash.
Even as Northern spread its wings to these new markets, though, rumblings came from the engineers that perhaps the company was spreading too quickly for its own good.
Business by the Bay
Northern shifted its research efforts and in 1996 took BNR completely under its wing, reorganizing its managers and absorbing the research arm into a new division.
The focus then became generating sales out of new products right away instead of looking 10 years down the line, noted Al Javed, who rose through the ranks of BNR and Nortel and retired as vice-president of wireless networks technology in 2005.
"If you look at Nortel's history, it was R & amp;D that made it right. It was R & amp;D that enabled it to make good products, and good products sell."
And as the end of the '90s approached, Statistics Canada and other agencies showed that more than a third of Canadians regularly accessed the Internet. The primacy of phone communications was coming to an end.
In recognition of this fact, senior Northern executives quietly went after a company they hoped would propel them to the front of Internet communications: Bay Networks, which at the time was fresh off a series of acquisitions itself.
The result was a $9.1-billion takeover in 1998 - the headliner of a series of takeovers that Northern initiated at a breathtaking pace. Cambrian Systems, Shasta Networks, X-CEL Communications and Qtera were among the acquisitions made around that time.
A three-page memo to Northern employees in June 1998, signed by then-CEO John Roth, identified local area networks and wide area networks as the new frontier for communications.
"Being the first to deliver these new generation networks to customers is a big growth opportunity," stated Mr. Roth.
"I see this (Bay Networks acquisition) as an investment in the future of the company and the major step in making the 'right-angle turn' Nortel needed to achieve our webtone vision."
Boomtimes
With the merger complete in the third quarter of 1998, Northern, which was already informally referred to as "Nortel" in company communications, officially made a name change to Nortel Networks Corp., to symbolize its new emphasis on the Internet.
However, "the core technology (of the new acquisitions) did not deliver on these outcomes," said Samih Elhage, Nortel's current president of carrier voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) and applications solutions.
As the company searched for a way to solve the problem, the markets began to hit a wall in late 1998. Revenues were still high - the company posted a US$17.6-billion stream that year, and $22.2 billion the next - but the explosive growth Nortel enjoyed began to stall.
The company needed to move forward with "more focused investments" to keep everything viable, Mr. Elhage said. But through this transition period, R & amp;D always remained the focus of Nortel - especially in Ottawa.
"Our strategy in Ottawa was to be the heart and the brain of the R & amp;D machine of Nortel. That's why, for all the different competencies required to build any product in the telecom industry, we had this capability in Ottawa," he said.
The tech bust of 2000 was just around the corner, even as Nortel hit its peak employment of 107,000 people - around 96,000 of those as full-time employees, with 15,000 crowding several facilities in Ottawa alone.
But a lack of perceived career advancement opportunities was thinning out the ranks at the middle management level, said Jim Hjartarson, especially among those who held the corporate memory of Nortel.
"We lost a lot of people, and the consequences weren't really visible immediately," the former manager recalled. "But I think when you got into the late 1990s, the new product pipeline in Nortel was pretty thin."
