InnovationOne Founder and Partners

The InnovationOne®, LLC, founder and partners are today’s thought leaders on innovation. Dr. Brooke Dobni, InnovationOne’s founder and a managing partner, has published over 25 peer-reviewed, academic articles on innovation. With a perspective based on this leading edge research, our consultants work with organizations to make the transition to sustainably innovative and proactive cultures and become leaders in their industry.

C. Brooke Dobni

  • Innovation Thought Leader
  • Scientific Researcher and Author
  • Founder of InnovationOne
  • Corporate Strategy and Execution
  • Sustainable Development of Competitive Advantage
  • Profitable Growth

Dr. Brooke Dobni is the founder of InnovationOne®, LLC. He is also a Professor of Strategy and has served as the Dean and Associate Dean at the Edwards School of Business, University of Saskatchewan. Since 1995, he has been involved in providing consulting services to some of Canada’s largest organizations. Dr. Dobni’s expertise lies in the areas of innovation orientation profiling, and providing strategic counsel to organizations wanting to advance their innovation orientation. Through his own research, he has developed the InnovationOne Culture Index©, an innovation culture assessment metric. InnovationOne® has been used by over 2000 organizations across North America, and continues to be referred to as one of the most comprehensive, holistic and reliable measures of innovation culture in organizations.

Dr. Dobni’s a true thought leader in innovation. He advances his knowledge through scientific research. His current focus is on identifying innovation enhancers: defining the relationship between strategy, innovation, and performance in organizations, and making innovation tangible so that organizations can benefit from it. He has published over 30 peer reviewed articles on strategy and innovation in journals, including the Strategic Management Journal, Business Horizons, Journal of Business Strategy, the European Journal of Innovation Management, Crafting and Executing Strategy, and Ivey Business Quarterly to name a few. In 2013, he completed one of the largest surveys to measure innovation culture ever done among Fortune 1000 companies in the United States.

He holds a Ph.D. in Strategy from the University of Bradford, Bradford-Leeds, and an MBA and Business Communications degree from the University of Saskatchewan.

Victor Assad

  • Global Human Resources
  • Organization Development
  • Executive Coach
  • Culture and Strategy Execution
  • Innovation
  • Profitable Growth

Victor Assad is a managing partner of InnovationOne®, LLC, the author of Hack Recruiting: The Best of Empirical Research, Method and Process, and Digitization.  His second book on developing cultures of innovation will be published in 2022.

He is a results driven, innovative and broadly experienced global human resources leader who works with organizations on talent management, leadership development, accelerating change, organizational and culture development, innovation, and other strategic initiatives. With over 25 years of experience, Victor has led human resources organizations in fast growth global businesses for Honeywell and Medtronic. His industry experience includes: medical device, aerospace, software, specialty semi-conductors, and electronics.

Through his work, Victor has seen first-hand that organizational culture is tangible, measurable and can either enable or stifle the implementation of business strategies. Innovation requires creating a culture that empowers employees to ideate and also fail fast, frequently and furiously in order to generate the new products, services and business models of the future. Victor knows that leaders can change their organization’s culture. Leaders of innovative companies need to nurture cultures of innovation to generate new value and improve their market positioning and financial performance.

Victor has a Master’s Degree in Human Resources/Industrial Relations from the University of Minnesota and executive certificates from Harvard and Kellogg. He is recognized for his strong business acumen, strategic thinking, analytical skills, and ability to design and implement effective talent management systems that drive business results. Victor blogs weekly, and is quoted in national magazines on talent management issues.

Ed Colby

  • Operational Asset Effectiveness
  • Human Capital Management Effectiveness
  • Workforce Management Effectiveness
  • Innovation Maturity
  • Sustainable Competitiveness

Ed Colby is a workforce and operational effectiveness leader with a focus on Human Capital Management, Workforce Management, and Innovation Management. He has been a student and educator of management and technology for over 35 years. His professional passion is helping build higher-performing organizations by optimizing the full alignment, utilization, and productive effectiveness of people, process, systems, technology, and information.

As a practitioner leader for nearly 20 years, and an external consultant for nearly 20 years, Ed held executive leadership roles in workforce and operational management consulting, value analysis, systems and application design and implementation, and marketing. He has led many large-scale systems and operations transformation and implementation engagements at Fortune 100 companies.

Ed has experienced the “excitement” and enthusiasm of helping birth three high-tech start-up organizations, as well as helped sustain the growth of two global technology market leaders.

Many leaders espouse innovation as a critical component of business strategy. However, relatively few organizations are perceived as innovative, or sustain it over time. There is a huge gap between strategy and execution in most organizations. As such, most organizations fail to make full productive use of the capabilities and capacity of their workforce and technology. Ed helps organizations more fully understand and create a Culture of Innovation to be able to more effectively leverage their people, technologies, systems and processes, and information – leading to higher performance and operating results.

Ed holds a M.B.A. degree in Marketing and Computer Sciences from Northeastern University, and a B.S. degree from Tufts University.

Key Skills and Experience
• Human Capital Effectiveness
• Systems and Operational Effectiveness
• Innovation Maturity
• Sustainable Competitiveness