United States patent number 5,231,973, the single-hand-operated, camshaft-enabled disposable plastic speculum with built-in fluid reservoir, developed in the waning days of the 1980s, will never be remembered as one of the more vital innovations of the dawning digital age. Nor will the same inventor’s bottle for white glue with housing to attach glue stick, developed in 1993 (patent number 5,316,398). Likewise with 2001’s “rotatably disposed” drive mechanism for an oscillating head (6,536,066) or even last year’s behaviour-monitoring toothbrush (application 20090307859; patent pending) that proposes—in a belated nod, perhaps, to the advent of the iPad era—to dole out video game minutes to children who properly brush their teeth.
And yet as unsexy as the business may be, inventor Robert Dickie and his firm, Spark Innovations, are doing just fine. That speculum design sold for cash and royalties to a U.S. medical products company a few years ago. The glue-bottle-and-stick combination, designed for the owner of LePage’s Inc. to introduce high-margin glue sticks to reluctant North American consumers, became a retail hit and helped transform the school and children’s adhesives market. And while the video game toothbrush has yet to find a market, that rotatably disposed oscillating head helped make one of Spark’s spinoff ventures, called BrushPoint Innovations, the top supplier of house brand electric toothbrushes to Walgreens, Shoppers Drug Mart, Loblaws and Zellers. “From a cold start in 1995, we’re the fourth-biggest power toothbrush company in North America,” Dickie says. “And nobody knows our name.”
So it goes for a design and development firm. Spark, run by Dickie and partner Steve Copeland in King City, a bedroom community north of Toronto, will never be a brand name. Rather, the company is devoted to giving the brand names a plump product pipeline.
Dickie is tall, lean and tanned. He wears black jeans and a gold necklace, smells like cigarette smoke (he recently submitted a patent application for something called “Tobacco product packaging for use therewith”) and curses with a level of commitment that even a cattle rustler could admire. While he does talk as quickly, and sometimes as wildly, as you’d expect of a serial inventor, Dickie is also deeply pragmatic. Imagine Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future) crossed with John Wayne’s Ringo Kid, and you’ve got the idea.
Spark’s founding principles sprang from Dickie’s experience as president and CEO of Northern Technologies in the 1980s. At the time, the company, based in Markham, Ontario, was a world leader in high-end video display terminals. Dickie keeps one of its terminals, a pallid grey box save for the blinking of a phosphorescent green cursor, under glass at Spark’s offices as an object lesson in how not to run an innovation business. Each new terminal model cost $2.3 million in research and development just to get to manufacturing, Dickie says. The terminals were so complicated that you could never adequately protect them with patents. (It’s a truism in the business that the simpler an innovation is, the easier it is to protect.)
Right next to the terminal, Dickie keeps a set of black plastic rings that look a lot like gaskets for a garden hose. As humble as they seem, those rings are Dickie’s pride and joy. In 1984, the Federal Communications Commission in the U.S. ruled that computer networking cables had to be shielded to prevent radio interference. While still at Northern, Dickie spent just over $20,000 to develop and patent the plastic rings for this very job—cable connection covers that would fit seven different common sizes. That investment, representing about one one-hundredth of what the company spent to develop its signature products, paid for itself in three months, he says. And then it kept going: Northern Technologies sold billions of them. Northern soon got out of the terminals business altogether and became a connector covers company; it still dominates the field today.
Dickie didn’t stay around to see that happen. Not long after the rings went to market, he resolved to become a full-time inventor and gave Northern his notice. “This is the Spark model,” Dickie says, pointing to the rings. “It’s simple, highly proprietary and something that nobody gives a shit about.”
