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We can’t offer them ocean, beaches or mountains, but we can try and offer them the best environment, the best collaborators, the best equipment that would be conducive to them making the breakthroughs of their lifetime

Mike Lazaridis, whose invention of the BlackBerry smartphone more than a decade ago redefined the way people send e-mail, is drawing inspiration from the early days of computing for his next act.

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Backed by his $100 million donation, the Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre opens Friday in Waterloo, Ontario, aiming to recreate the conditions that made AT&T Inc.’s Bell Labs a hive of technological innovation in the early 1960s and laid the groundwork for the success of Silicon Valley.

The new research center is designed to produce breakthroughs in the science and technology of things approaching the size of an atom. It’s “absolutely” going to be the Bell Labs of the 21st century, Lazaridis said Thursday in a telephone interview. “That reality got clearer and clearer to me as we got closer to the ribbon-cutting.”

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Lazaridis, who resigned as chairman of struggling BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. in January, says he’s now devoting most of his time to help get the Quantum-Nano Centre off the ground and to form a cluster of cutting-edge research with the decade-old Institute for Quantum Computing and Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, both founded with a total of more than $250 million of his own money and additional funds he helped raise.