How The Cleveland Inventors Behind Nottingham Spirk Went From Consumer Products To Medical Devices

Cleveland inventors John Nottingham and John Spirk made a name for themselves designing consumer products. Over the past 50 years, their firm, Nottingham Spirk, created the Swiffer SweeperVac, Crest Spinbrush, Dirt Devil vacuum and more than 1,300 other patented products. But long before the pandemic hit, they’d begun building up a new business in medical devices, a move that has positioned them well as that area has become increasingly important.

Last year, Nottingham Spirk worked on 16 medical products, double the eight it had worked on in 2017, according to data provided by the firm. All told, it has teamed up on more than 100 healthcare offerings, at an accelerating pace, over the past two decades. Those devices range from technology to help treat concussions to a new type of breast ultrasound tomography.

“We’ve applied some of our consumer-product knowledge to medical devices, and that may be why we are so effective,” Nottingham says. “The medical-device industry is technically oriented, but not always patient-oriented.”

Nottingham Spirk’s business model, as Forbes detailed in a 2014 magazine profile (“The Invention Machine) sets it apart. It invites companies that have included Procter & Gamble, Sherwin-Williams and Mars to come to it with product quandaries. It then invents a solution, and lets clients pay with cash upfront, royalties down the road, or equity stakes. The firm says that it has generated more than $50 billion in sales for the companies for whom it has developed patented products.

Nottingham Spirk’s move into medical devices began more than a decade ago when John Nottingham and John Spirk, who are both on the board of trustees of the Cleveland Clinic, started to imagine how their expertise in consumer goods might apply to medical devices. One of the first medical projects they worked on was for a company called CardioInsight that was set up in 2006 to commercialize electrocardiographic imaging developed at Case Western.

“When we got it, there was this vest that looked like it torture device,” Nottingham recalls. “We reduced it down to an electronic vest that you put on.” In 2015, Medtronic acquired CardioInsight and its non-invasive vest for $93 million.

In some cases, Nottingham Spirk has gained the medical technology itself and set up a company; in others inventors or entrepreneurs have come to it with their design problems. The firm sometimes helps startups gain outside funding to commercialize their products in addition to working on the design.

In 2016, John Zak, a trained surgeon and serial entrepreneur, teamed up with Nottingham Spirk at TekTraum after they contacted him about some technology they’d gotten for a concussion-care garment. The device goes over the head and neck of a patient to reduce intrabrain temperature without reducing core temperature. The latter typically requires a patient to be under anesthesia and intubated, Zak says. TekTraum’s device received a breakthrough designation from the FDA last year and is now running studies at Dayton Children’s Hospital, University of Michigan and elsewhere.

“Historically medical devices looked archaic and industrial. They weren’t user-friendly,” says Zak, TekTraum’s CEO. “Now if you are a medical device company bringing a device to market, you cannot submit for approval without usability testing and you’ve got to pass and pass with flying colors.”

In the case of Sterifree, it was the company’s CEO, Rick Shea, a former Abbott Labs executive and cofounder of Stericycle, who reached out. He was working with a Cornell University inventor on an infection control device in 2016, and learned about Nottingham and Spirk through a mutual connection to the Cleveland Clinic during a trip to Cleveland. “We got a call from Rick literally 11 in the morning, and he was in our office by noon,” Spirk says.

The prototypes that Shea brought over were enormous and made from hardware-store parts. The designers at Nottingham Spirk took that concept and shrunk it down to a device that could be mounted on a desk or a wall. “The proof of concept worked, but it wasn’t ready for commercialization,” Nottingham says. “The scientists, when they are doing a proof of concept they don’t care about the expense, they don’t care about the size. We reverse-engineer it to get to something commercial.”

In November, Sterifree received registration from the EPA (whose purview it falls under as a disinfection product, Shea says), for its microwave-sized device to disinfect electronic devices like mobile phones and and iPads, as well as other items that are difficult disinfect, such as blood-pressure cuffs. “Consumer products have to be well made and inexpensive. Medical products usually aren’t developed that way,” Shea says. “Usually you develop something that works, you get it approved and you figure out how to fix it later.”

Today, Nottingham says, about half the design firm’s staff of 75 works on medical devices of some form or another. While the firm’s design goal is simplicity whether for a medical product or a consumer one, “it’s a different business even though there is engineering involved,” Spirk says. “It’s not a toaster or a microwave.”