While many outside of Waterloo Region see the area’s economy as dependent on Research in Motion, there are actually a number of factors that contribute to its success.

And it’s not just a question of having successful technology firms, but a multitude of factors that are at play when it comes to creating those companies.

It all starts with education. It was 1957 when the University of Waterloo came into being as a unique co-op educational institute established by a couple of businessmen and a reverend.

“The university was very much developed by a group of industrialists, not academics, and I think that was viewed as heresy at the time,” says Geoff McBoyle.

McBoyle is the associate vice-president of academic and strategic initiatives at the University of Waterloo (UW).

He says the school’s founders pushed programs they hoped would help Canada compete in the space race.

Ten years later UW was the first university in North America to have its own Faculty of Mathematics and School of Computer Science.

Deny Hamel, a third year PhD student specializing in quantum optics, says focusing on math was a risky move at the time.

“We didn’t know computing was going to be as big, and that we’d have, you know, everyone would have a computer in their pockets, at all times, by the year 2012.”

Mike Lazaridis, a pioneer in the smart phone industry and co-founder of RIM, was a student at UW in the early 1980s.

He dreamed of hand-held computers as a student, and went on help create one of the region’s most well-known companies.

“We had computers, we had operating systems, we had networking, now this was 1980. I doubt most of us knew about the internet or about email until the late 1990s.”

It’s a big success story, but certainly not the only success story at UW.

The university’s policy is to allow students to develop their own ideas and keep the intellectual property rights for themselves.

“In the last four years,” McBoyle says, “They’ve developed 184 projects, they’ve set up 20 companies, they’ve hired 200 people and they’ve brought in venture capital of $30 million. And these are students!”

The university’s ability to graduate highly skilled tech students is coupled with an equally important entrepreneurial spirit.

What’s unique about Waterloo Region’s entrepreneurs is that they like each other, and are willing to help other small companies thrive.

Even famed physicist Stephen Hawking, in town in late September to mark the opening of the Quantum Nano Centre, sees a rare combination.

The distinguished research chair at the Perimeter Institute says “It is special for many reasons, including its collaborative culture, its research excellence, its philanthropic visionaries and its leadership in post-secondary education.”

Coming up in part two: Meet the founders of the tech startup Maluuba, who graduated in April, but already have funding from Samsung and hope to one day rival Apple’s Siri.