“It’s satisfying to be so relevant in our industry; it’s a great privilege. To be relevant is the greatest joy and reward of it all.”

It is for these achievements and more that Balsillie, 48, is being presented with the 2009 International Distinguished Entrepreneur Award (I.D.E.A.) by the Associates of the University of Manitoba’s Asper School of Business. He will be in town June 2 to receive the award at a formal dinner at the Winnipeg Convention Centre.

The I.D.E.A. award was created 26 years ago “to honour an individual who has achieved international stature, outstanding business success and who has made exemplary contributions to the economic life of Canada and the world.” Balsillie joins past recipients Israel Asper, Richard Branson, Paul Desmarais, Dame Anita Roddick, Martha Stewart, and last year’s recipient, Peter Munk, to name a few.

“It’s a great honour, and I’m humbled and thrilled by it,” Balsillie said in a brief phone interview tucked between meetings in early May (with Phoenix Coyotes owner Jerry Moyes, perhaps? Balsillie’s bid for the bankrupt NHL franchise was on the table during the writing of this article).

Balsillie’s recent honours are many. In April he and his wife Heidi received the Kitchener Rotary Clubs’ Paul Harris award for international and community service, and in May he and Lazaridis were inducted into the Canadian Business Hall of Fame by Junior Achievement Canada.

“It’s satisfying to be so relevant in our industry; it’s a great privilege,” he said. “To be relevant is the greatest joy and reward of it all.”

The rewards have come with a few bumps along the way. Earlier this year RIM paid fines to both the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Ontario Securities Commission relating to how it granted stock options between 1998 and 2006.

These events have seemingly not affected the success of BlackBerry, and that success has allowed Balsillie to put his money behind the things he believes in. While partner Lazaridis’s philanthropic work leans more toward science and technology, Balsillie is more of a political and social sciences man, founding three initiatives that each build Canada’s capacity on global issues in a slightly different way.

Why global affairs? “To me, they are the issues of our time,” he said. “They are borderless and they are intractable, so that’s why the focus on global governance is so important. [When we started] I tried to make a case that our commercial and domestic prosperity were completely intertwined with these global issues. That’s a lot easier case to make now than it was then.

“Now we’ve got climate change, Arctic sovereignty, trade issues, nuclear proliferation, and surprise, global governance and health issues. These issues don’t respect our borders and yet all of our governing structures principally focus within our borders. That’s the dilemma.”

Finding solutions on a global scale, literally, is the focus of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), the independent, non-partisan think tank Balsillie founded with $30 million of his own money in 2002. The centre, based in Waterloo and employing 60 people, supports research, advances policy debate, and generates ideas for international governance improvements.

CIGI worked quietly behind the scenes for several years to encourage expansion of the G8 and helped facilitate the creation of the G20, which was formally established in November 2008. Now CIGI is engaged in a project called “G20 Watch,” which looks at the protectionist measures of countries that often play a role ineconomic crises. The centre has also been a key player in discussions about reforming the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and IFI (International Financial Institutions).