Our team

Prior to working at Doblin, he worked as an Account Manager for Johnson Controls, Inc. managing client relationships and developing solutions for clients in industries such as life sciences, automotive, food and beverage, and computer software. His experience there helped him learn to empathize with his clients and their situations.

Known as the human garbage disposal to close friends, never be afraid to ask Steve to eat your leftovers.

An avid tennis player, Steve still fantasizes of playing in The French Open.

Steven Babitch's interests lie in the intersection of user-centered design, innovation planning, and traditional business methodology. As a consultant for Doblin, he analyzes people’s behavior along with trends and facts found in the world to create defensible business concepts for companies and organizations to implement.

Steven holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan. The structured thought process of engineering was a good start for Steven, but limited his creative nature. Motivated to use both left and right brain thinking, Steven found the IIT Institute of Design, where he received his Master of Design degree.

Clinton Barth is a project consultant firmly situated at the intersection of business, design, theory and practice, who focuses on creating new understanding and empathy through exploratory research and motivating bold action through storytelling and collaboration.
Clint has practiced this approach in industries as varied as finance, healthcare, non-profit and consumer goods on projects ranging from workplace strategy, retail experience design, online marketing and brand strategy. On each of these projects, he aims to help clients realize the nuance and power contained in seemingly simple ideas.

Clint has an undergraduate degree and graduate level studies in communications at Seton Hall University, a Master of Design Planning from the IIT Institute of Design, and is currently enrolled at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business where he is studying strategy, economics and organizational behavior.

While he continues to add to his breadth of knowledge, Clint remains frustrated that he still has not been able to find a way to actually transform himself into a “T.”

Clint enjoys studying current and historical politics, but knows better than to discuss them at parties.

Marilyn joined the firm in 1997. Prior to Doblin, she worked at Rand McNally supporting new business development and the National Association of Realtors, providing reference services to its huge membership. Marilyn has a Master of Library Science degree from Northern Illinois University and graduate and undergraduate degrees in fine arts from the University of Illinois at Champaign. She devoted many years to choreographing and producing dance performances.

Marilyn taught Elementary School for several years, which proved to be matchless preparation for Doblin team meetings.

She greatly enjoys motorcycles, canoeing, and gardening, and keeps a sharp eye out for convergences among these fields. Nothing yet.

Marilyn Brda is the Practice Area Leader for the secondary research component of Doblin's innovation intelligence capability. She is a library scientist who specializes in researching cultural issues and trends. As the leader of these contextual research efforts, she coordinates the team on content quality as well as new methods and tools. She also conducts research as a team member and helps to shape Doblin content for speaking events and workshops. Her current broad focus is on healthcare and food issues.

Jarrod’s passion for the intersection of business and psychology led him to major in Commerce with concentrations in Marketing and Management at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce. He holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Jarrod considered himself an avid cyclist until his beloved road bike was stolen. Any information leading to the return of the bike will be rewarded, no questions asked. In the meantime, he has taken up cooking (an arguably counter-productive pursuit, relative to cycling) where he has MUCH to learn. Many questions asked here.

Since joining Monitor, Jarrod has helped clients grow organically through insight driven marketing strategy. His work has ranged from product launch strategies to capability-building efforts, and has spanned a variety of industries including pharmaceuticals, beverages, furniture, media, and the public sector.

Jarrod’s interest in exploring new ways to understand and address customers’ needs brought him to Doblin, where he finds the traditional choices of marketing strategy are augmented by new opportunities to delight customers. The combination of analysis and synthesis has proven very intellectually rewarding, and Jarrod enjoys the variety of perspectives and approaches that come from collaborating with a multi-disciplinary team.

Dan's wide studies in modern and classical era sciences are now threatened by his growing enthusiasm for genealogy.

Though intermittent, he continues his dedication to breaking new barriers in great bread making.

Dan Chichester is a Research Specialist at Doblin with an emphasis on the evolving capabilities of teams in the field. He assists teams in developing field research strategies, gathering, storing and structuring the raw data, then analyzing and sharing it.

Dan helps to connect what is desirable -- from a research point of view -- with what is possible -- from a technology point of view. He is a first rate photographer and long time archivist of the Doblin image library.

Dan has managed photo labs and taught or practiced architectural, industrial, and scientific photography. He holds a BS degree in liberal arts from Grand Valley State University in Michigan and a master of design degree from the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago.

A growing interest in the “whole picture” led her to Kellogg; her academic concentration in organizational behavior and strategy made her an ideal choice to lead the Doblin side of the firm's integration into Monitor. She works on strengthening Doblin's contributions to the Monitor Executive Briefings and participates in the planning, execution, analysis, and presentation of research on client projects. Her undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University is in Sociology.

Audrey was formerly diligent about exploring the world. Being "unbelievably busy"is trailing off as a serviceable excuse.

She has set her sights on learning to sail as the next great pursuit.

Years of project management as the producer of the leading Chicago morning radio program helped Audrey Clarke learn to listen carefully to customers and team members, to manage against tight deadlines, and to start her day at an impossibly early hour. As a consultant with Doblin she has elected to focus on the first two. 
Before receiving her MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 2002, Audrey worked at WGN radio as the producer of the morning show. While she mastered the exigencies of production and brokered some occasionally clashing objectives, she came to understand editorial relevance as well as the lesser factors behind the news.

His multi-generational roots in Massachusetts are strengthened still further by a family book club which concentrates on classic literature.

Erik rides his bicycle everywhere. Look both ways before entering our elevators.

Erik Van Crimmin is a consultant and design strategist whose balanced background in economics and design help him make holistic contributions to his work at Doblin. His instincts for improving products, services, and customer experiences are supported by years of personal experience with design methods and economic analysis.

After completing his BA in Economics at Colby College, Erik worked as a consultant in Boston for CRA International, solving complex economic problems and managing risk for clients worldwide. Personal exploration took him first to classes at the Harvard School of Design and then to a program at Umeå University, developments which ultimately led him to the IIT Institute of Design and a Master of Design degree in Design Planning.

It was this tension that brought Colin to Doblin, ultimately to help clients find, understand and chase undefined sources of value in novel ways. He's as comfortable getting his hands dirty implementing a pilot program as he is stepping back to develop broad strategies or organizational constructs to unlock a firm's innovation potential.
He holds an Honors Bachelor of Commerce in Finance and Economics from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

When set loose, you will likely find Colin building something, chopping wood, or staring at stars at his family cottage in the Canadian North.

He tends to shamelessly converse on personal pursuits in biology, world history, physics and astronomy, with unsuspecting friends.

Colin's career in business started at an early age, as he worked for a number of Canada's national banks. Since joining Monitor, his eyes have quickly opened to new industries from media and telecommunications to heavy manufacturing to social development. The rigorous analytical approaches he employs to help clients de-construct competitive, financial and marketing strategy problems are complemented by his natural curiosity about people, science, technology and 'what could be'.

scenario planning and business strategy work with GBN. This helps Chris craft ideas, reshape them in the context of client and international realities, and steer them through to implementation and launch. He is greatly excited about adding design to this mix.

Chris's first professional role as a writer and editor still stand him well when he prepares his annual annotated analysis of last year's music.

His persona when playing tennis (aggressive serve-and-volley style) inexplicably maps to nothing in the rest of his life.

Chris Ertel joined Doblin after serving for many years as the co-head of the consulting practice of our collegial organization, Global Business Network. He works at Doblin as an account lead, guiding overall program management while extending and deepening Doblin's client relationships. His diversified background in group dynamics complements and extends Doblin's design-centered approach to consulting. He relishes the challenges of helping new ideas make their way through complex organizations of live humans.

Chris holds advanced degrees (master's in anthropology and doctorate in demography from UC-Berkeley) thus studying the field of social science from both ends of its evidence spectrum, from qualitative to quantitative. He has direct experience and familiarity with public policy, the legislative process, and the academic world, plus rich encounters from a decade of

makes people tick. Her desire to bring such insights into the product and service world eventually brought her to IIT's Institute of Design and Stuart School of Business. She's completed her Master of Design degree in May of 2011 and will complete her MBA in December 2011.

Holly dreams of one day breeding Alpacas; however, she is not sure how to reconcile it with her preference for city life.

Growing up in Palo Alto, California and Charleston, South Carolina she acquired a unique appreciation of denim and seersucker, strong coffee and sweet tea, and towering stillness-surrounded redwoods and majestic Spanish moss-covered oak trees.

Holly Finnan's innovation experience spans business, design, and research. Combining her anthropologist mother’s open and questioning view of the world with her lawyer father’s logic and structure, she loves diving into complex, fuzzy problems and emerging with new business- and user-centered solutions.

Prior to joining Doblin, Holly’s passion for solving complex problems attracted her to health care. Her experience includes helping a major hospital establish new satellite center operations and improve internal systems for sharing patient information, and an outpatient facility help cancer patients find the clinical information that fits their needs.

With an undergraduate degree in psychology from Vassar College, Holly has the research skills and grounding in psychology to do a disciplined job of delving into what

She has studied and worked in fine arts, urban planning, architecture, and product design. Brandy holds degrees from Southwestern University (near her native Austin, Texas) and the IIT Institute of Design.

Brandy was in NYC for September 11 and the 2003 blackout and has not yet set a date for a return visit.

She hopes that a life which now includes broad reading and regular running will also one day soon include generous sleeping.

Brandy Fowler is a consultant with an emphasis on user-centered design and strategy. She contributes to project planning, field research, analysis, synthesis, and innovation concept visualization.

Brandy is also an information designer who has studied and worked in a full range of visual media: drawings, models, 3D images, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, and digital tools. She is also a fair hand at Flash development.

Angelo teaches workshops on creative collaboration, customer insights and new product definition, most recently for a boutique marketing firm and as an assistant professor of Industrial Design at Kendall College of Art and Design. He has a Masters Degree in Design from the IIT Institute of Design and a Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Angelo finds particular solace in cooking traditional Italian meals using high-tech gadgets and making the most out of leftovers.

He longs for a vehicle that runs on old cooking oil and hopes that one day we will be able to recycle everything.

Angelo Frigo's career path has taken him from Bioengineering focused on MRI, to studying the brain and creativity, to his current pursuits of innovation and design. As a consultant at Doblin, he uses this understanding of how people think to conceive of real world business concepts, as well as ways to get ideas through organizational hoops. Angelo is well versed in planning, prototyping, and user research. He brings particular acumen on how to overcome internal barriers to innovation based on a wide variety of experiences including bioscience, international engineering projects, product marketing for a consumer goods start-up, industrial design, and most recently strategy research for a Fortune 500 corporation.

geophysical science and environmental studies from the University of Chicago. Jessie has recently made a return to the world of academia, serving as adjunct faculty at both the IIT Institute of Design and Columbia College of Art and Design in Chicago.

As a child, Jessie spent summers on a family farm in Iowa next to the Field of Dreams. She now returns to the state each year to ride on the Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI).

Jessie organizes Spare Wheels, an annual CD club with friends, family, and acquaintances. if you want to rock.

JJessie Gatto is a design strategist at Doblin. Her interests lie at the intersection of structured problem solving and the clear visualization and communication of concept solutions. Jessie believes that a proposed opportunity or concept is only as strong as it is well communicated to its intended audience. Prior to joining the Doblin team, Jessie held design planning and information design positions in environmental design, city government, and furniture manufacturing. Her industry experience at Doblin has been focused on healthcare and consumer product goods.

Jessie’s interest in math, science, and design attracted her to the Institute of Design and later to the interdisciplinary approach at Doblin. She has a Master of Design from IIT Institute of Design and an undergraduate degree in

Geri Gibbs endured several years of managing law offices before bringing her coordinating skills (and her patience) to Doblin.

In addition to coordinating appearances and speaking engagements for Larry Keeley, president of Doblin, she also oversees the daily routines of the firm, including scheduling, hospitality, travel arrangements, and special events, with an unfailingly polite but unapologetically firm outlook.

Persons inquiring about the availability of Larry Keeley may do well to first contact Geri.

Geri still greatly laments the passing of Jerry Garcia.

technology sectors.

Ben is a graduate of Wake Forest University where he earned a business/finance degree.

Ben currently resides in Boston, MA where he is an avid fan of all things related to Boston sports. Over the years he believes he has perfected the art of tail-gaiting in support of this passion

Ben Jonash is a program and relationship manager at Monitor and within Doblin, Monitor’s Innovation practice.
Ben focuses on leading interdisciplinary teams that bring multiple perspectives together in addressing some of our clients most difficult growth and innovation challenges.

Since joining the firm in 2003,
Ben has worked with a particular interest in helping firms stretch out of their core business to develop new and innovative approaches to create and capture value with customers. His brings experience in a broad range of industries and geographies. More recently he has been spending his time in the pharmaceutical, healthcare and

Katie holds a BA degree in political science and Spanish from the University of Notre Dame. She was born in Brazil and has lived in Germany and in Spain. When time allows, she tutors Spanish-speaking Chicagoans in English. Whatever time is left over is often absorbed by reading history and political biography.

Katie enjoys running marathons and playing tennis (though not marathons of tennis).

Her extraordinary capacity for detail seems to abandon her when it comes to finding her keys.

Katie Joyce is a consultant at Doblin, participating directly in research, analysis and synthesis to help craft concrete insights and direction for clients. She has worked with clients in industries such as healthcare, financial services, foodservice and nonprofit to enhance the experience of customers and derive entirely new businesses. Katie began her career at Doblin as a secondary researcher, delivering research and analysis to project teams, and continually uses her writing and research skills to enhance her role as a consultant.

Katie developed her core business strengths in financial services while working with Marcus Evans, a respected business information services company. Her five-month career in banking convinced her that understanding a subset of a transaction would not go far enough toward making life better for financial customers.

She has a Masters Degree in Design from the IIT Institute of Design and a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Seoul National University.

Hyuniee loves to explore and travel the world. She is always looking for new experiences. Her most unforgettable one to date was bungi jumping 111 meters off of Victoria Falls in Zambia.

Her natural habitat is the city; she vows never to go camping in the woods again after annual family vacations in the wilderness.

Hyuniee Jung is a researcher and innovation consultant who loves to hear stories. In particular, the stories she hears while conducting research drive her work. She is extremely happy to have found the innovation world which combines her love of logic inherited from her father, a statistician, and her creative side inherited from her mother, an oil painter.

As a consultant at Doblin, working through the innovation process gives her a greater understanding of how each stage within the process builds upon the next. After majoring in computer science, she was drawn to the world of human computer interaction, which led her to the Institute of Design where she learned to think incessantly about user needs.

Larry is a cofounder of Doblin and was lucky enough to have Jay Doblin as a mentor for a decade. He is the current president of Doblin, and a frequent lecturer and teacher about frontiers of innovation and strategy. Larry has worked with a wide variety of pioneering enterprises since 1979. He is a board member for the IIT Institute of Design where he also teaches graduate level innovation strategy classes. He is a lecturer in innovation at Kellogg and University of Chicago and at many executive education programs. He is also a board member for WBEZ-FM in Chicago, where he has been instrumental in charting strategies that have made it the nation's most innovative public radio station.

Secretly wants to be a research biologist

Loves literature, jazz music, and tacky pop-culture stuff

Teaches famously grueling courses on innovation at the Institute of Design

Larry Keeley is an innovation strategist who often wonders why people bother to listen to innovation "experts" at all, since innovation fails about 96% of the time. It seems self-evident that the field has advanced to about the same state as medicine had when leeches, liniments and mystery potions were sophisticated treatments. On occasions when Larry can get someone to listen, he is inclined to reveal pieces of the emerging science of innovation that is at the heart of Doblin's practice. By being obsessive about identifying the root causes of innovation failure and injecting better methods, it is now possible to systematically boost innovation 'hit rates' to between 35% and 70%. That is an improvement of 10-15 times over the results people try to convince themselves are "normal."

Prior to Doblin, he worked as a systems designer of offshore oil and gas installations for the North Sea. Erik is fluent in Norwegian.

In his spare time, Erik tries to find new ways to freeze. His most recent and successful discovery in advanced refrigeration is mountaineering, which he has found can be equally cold year-round.

Although Erik grew up in Norway, he has only recently admitted that he was born in Sweden.

Erik Kiaer leads client relationships at Doblin. With his deep experience at Doblin, Erik is key to Doblin's efforts to leverage methods and content for new clients. He is also a frequent speaker at business conferences.

With a background in mechanical engineering from McGill University in Montreal and a master of design degree in human-centered design from the IIT Institute of Design, Erik bridges the worlds of research, planning, design, and strategy. At Doblin, he has worked with a broad range of companies in the travel, consumer goods, technology, and financial services industries. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

She has also worked as the general manager of Chicago's Shakespeare Repertory Theater (now the Chicago Shakespeare Company), and as an associate producer and operations manager for the Time-Warner syndicated Jenny Jones show. She holds a BS degree in marketing and accounting from Arizona State University.

Sarah  is a board member of Cetus and spends  time  each summer monitoring resident killer whales and educating boaters about marine mammals around beautiful Vancouver Island.  

She is also a Wish Granter for the Illinois chapter of Make A Wish Foundation. Sarah helps grant wishes for children with life threatening illnesses.

Sarah King is Doblin's finance manager, directing and overseeing the daily operations of finance and accounting for the firm. She works frequently with project managers and practice area leaders to improve the firm's efficiency and internal processes.

She served for many years on the management team of VIA International, a market strategies firm. She managed all aspects of global operations, building and maintaining the international finance systems of this successful company.

Country Magazine. After receiving a Master of Design degree from the IIT Institute of Design, she joined Gensler Architecture, Design & Planning where she pioneered a Design Strategy group responsible for innovative work at organizations like Microsoft, SRI International and the FBI.

The wildly disparate intellectual conversations from the fate of the red squirrel to the cult of the Black Madonna around her family table have made her comfortable with a broad range of topics.

Alex is diligently listening to podcasts in French in anticipation of pending membership in a French-speaking family.

Client connections, project management, strategy, and design planning are Alex Kinnebrew's core strengths, especially when they combine in new and interesting ways. Professionally, academically, and personally, her life has been an examination of new experiences.

Alex works at Doblin leading multi-disciplinary project teams toward their goals, but she brought an iterative and exploratory outlook with her when she joined the firm. These characteristics were forged in a family business and a one room school house in St. Lucia in the Caribbean and augmented by varying experiences like a summer job harvesting high altitude wildflower seeds and being in Siberia during the 1991 Russian Revolution. After graduating with a self-directed BA degree from Amherst College, her early professional career included a stint as Picture Editor for Town and

He started his career in 1975 with George Nelson & Company, worked briefly in corporate identity for Anspach Grossman Portugal (later merged into Interbrand), worked from 1978-85 for Vignelli Associates where he became graphic design director, and from 1985-95 at his own design consultancy, Laundy Rogers Design.

A graduate of Princeton University and the graphic design program at Yale Graduate School of Art, Peter now carves out time to be an adjunct professor in the graduate design-planning program at the IIT Institute of Design.

Has become an avid gardener while still being able to amaze his wife concerning the number of common flowering plants he cannot name.

Peter Laundy's talents and interests lie in translating research insights into innovation ideas, and innovation ideas into tangible concept visualizations. He has led these efforts on dozens of projects for Doblin.

He also leads project teams in driving Doblin's ideas into the details of its own marketing materials. He has created Doblin visual identity standards, led recent revisions of the Doblin website, and developed the Doblin Innovation Discipline Model.

Peter has worked on projects with Doblin since 1982 and has been on staff since 1995.

John’s career in client services has afforded him the opportunity to develop innovative and effective marketing solutions for diverse clients. He holds a BA in Economics from the University of Dayton.

On days that John does not make it to the gym, he has found that Red Bull is a reliable energy substitute.

Since relocating to Chicago four years ago, John has learned there are only two seasons in the city – hot and cold.

John Leach is a member of Doblin's contextual research team, developing research strategies, conducting research, and delivering analysis to project teams. He concentrates on competitive analysis, especially those aspects relating to finance and strategy. Always looking for the human elements that contribute to success, he is intrigued by the ways in which companies get ahead and stay there.

John believes that a deep understanding of an industry’s structure assists in determining overlooked opportunity areas for an organization to exploit. This combined with a solid understanding of end-user’s behavior can result in a powerful new market offering that leapfrogs the competition.

Passionate about baking since childhood, Yi Leng started a catering business at age 13, though looking back she now finds the economics inscrutable.

Camping in the rain forests of her native Malaysia has raised the bar for what constitutes an incredible sight.

Yi Leng Lee is a senior consultant with business, design, and engineering skills. At Doblin she tracks the insights of user research to their implications for strategy with a balanced feel for both the needs of an improved customer experience and the imperative to deliver this profitably. She delights in the discovery or definition of the new and in the study of unfamiliar industries.

Yi Leng has worked in the high protocol worlds of project management for pharma development as well as the design of integrated circuits. Her academic achievements began with an Electrical Engineering degree from Illinois Institute of Technology. After working for a time, she returned to IIT to simultaneously pursue and receive her MBA from the Stuart School of Business and her Masters of Design from the Institute of Design.

He received a Masters of Design from the IIT Institute of Design and also holds a BFA from Syracuse University. He is contemplating pursuing a degree in applied economics or girding himself for parenthood; either effort might become an exercise in futility.

Matt is a devout novice of photography and uses it as an excuse to explore the city and the world.

Matt is also deathly afraid of zombies and spends much of his free time preparing for the coming zombie apocalypse.

Matt Locsin is a project consultant specializing in the development of methods and tools. He is a perpetual student of the ways in which knowledge is gathered and applied to find meaning and effect. He will study, craft, extend, or test nearly any method that can contribute to these ends. Currently, he is adrift in the fields of strategy, economics, and complexity theory.

At Doblin Matt works as a design planner on consulting teams and helps to develop next generation methods for the firm's consulting and workshop practices.

Matthew has a B.S. in Business Administration from Miami University and has worked since 1992 as a secondary researcher.

Eight months in Spain was nowhere near enough.

A seasoned food slueth, he is consistently embellishing recipes, certain he can tell what they are missing.

Matthew Lopez is a member of Doblin's contextual research team, gathering and synthesizing research across industries, trends, and consumer behaviors. His many years as a researcher has provided him with an internal library of source material and a detailed knowledge of government statistical sites.

Past experience has provided him with a strong understanding of both the newspaper and retail industries. Before Doblin, Matthew worked as a research associate at Kannon Consulting and as an Information Specialist at McKinsey & Company.

chain reinvent drive-thru restaurants. He holds a BA in History from Yale University and a Master of Design from the IIT Institute of Design, where he teaches graduate classes in managing creativity and evaluating concepts. Working with an Institute of Design colleague, David co-authored Naked Innovation, a book documenting the user-centered innovation process.

As a Myers-Briggs INTJ, David is both enchanted with complex systems and easily bewitched by obscure details—one of his favorite books is a history of punctuation marks, where he learned the origins of the comma, pilcrow, and octothorpe.

He still has fairly strong opinions about typography—though he tries not to get too riled up when somebody uses Arial or Comic Sans.

David McGaw is an innovation consultant at Doblin, where he guides interdisciplinary teams working on client projects; he also helps provide thought leadership and develops client relationships. He draws on experience from his previous roles at gravitytank, where he was Strategy Lead, and at McKinsey & Company, where he advised business and government leaders on innovation, product development, lean service operations, and human capital strategy. He enjoys the energy of cross-functional collaboration, and the way empathetic research, rigorous analysis, and rich narratives combine to help solutions emerge and align organizations around implementation.

While his current focus is on strategy and innovation, David’s career began in experience design and graphic design, and included a stint helping a global restaurant

Bansi Nagji is a senior partner of Monitor Group, and leader of the firm’s global innovation practice.
As CEO of Monitor Innovation, he oversees all the firm’s efforts in the innovation space. Having long admired Doblin and Larry Keeley, Bansi foresaw the power of the combination, ultimately realized in 2007, of Doblin’s design capabilities and expertise in the discipline of innovation together with Monitor’s heritage in competitive strategy, business analytics and organizational transformation.

Bansi has direct responsibility for many of Monitor and Doblin’s largest clients. He has spent more than 15 years helping leaders of global companies with their toughest growth challenges. His primary areas of expertise are in innovation, strategy, leadership and the creation of new businesses. That experience has proved particularly valuable

in helping enterprise leaders set innovation strategy, find new growth opportunities and build sustainable innovation capabilities. While he has worked globally across many industries, he has particular expertise in life sciences, healthcare, retail and financial services.

He sits on the board of Market Force Information, Inc., a privately-held provider of customer experience information and insights. He also serves as a Venture Partner with Monitor Ventures, an independent investment firm affiliated with Monitor Group. Earlier in his career, he worked as an attorney in London with one of Europe’s largest law firms. He holds a BA and MA from Cambridge University, England, and an MBA with Distinction from INSEAD, France.

Tom holds a bachelor’s degree in History from Amherst College and completed his MBA at the Harvard Business School.

Tom is an aspiring chef, wine connoisseur, pilot, outdoorsman, diplomat, biologist, cartographer and adventurer.

His studies in horology directly support his aspirations.

Tom Nassim works as a program and relationship manager, leading teams centered on building innovation capacity within complex organizations. His interests lie in the exploration of the interrelationships among the fields of innovation, strategy, and organizational design.

Tom brings to Doblin a wealth of experience in competitive and corporate strategy, marketing strategy and organizational effectiveness. Over the past 10 years as a consultant, he has worked in a variety of industries, the most recent of which are healthcare, chemicals, and telecom.

Linda Ochoa is Doblin's Office Manager.

She always has a project underway.
Her home gets a lot of attention, such as remodeling, garden landscaping, painting and sewing.

Linda is very family oriented with relatives living near her and provides a home for two beloved cats, Jake and Cruella.

Ryan has worked as a communication designer, understanding audiences to create compelling messages and award winning communication pieces, based in Chicago, New York, Hong Kong, and Cleveland. He has helped a major corporate client’s Innovation Center to infuse their next-generation restaurant development with design thinking and methodologies.

If consulting does not work out he will be happy to become the general manager of the Cleveland Indians.

Ryan Pikkel is a design strategist and researcher on the quest for what’s next. He employs a broad range of methods to develop and articulate solutions that are empathetic to both end users and those who implement them. He works at Doblin as a project consultant well versed in the complete life cycle of a Doblin project: research, analysis, synthesis, and visualization.

He received a Masters of Design Degree from the IIT Institute of Design, holds a BFA from Syracuse University, and studied at the Sozosha College of Design in Osaka, Japan where he was the sole US communication designer invited.

Pip co-teaches Systems Workshop at the IIT Institute of Design; a class where the intersection of method and content regularly produce interesting results. He has the honor of teaching this course with Professor Charles Owen.

Trained academically as an historian, he holds a deep-rooted belief in the value of liberal arts in the world of technology. He is a graduate of Frostburg State University in Maryland. In the distant past, Pip's career began as communications director for a Silicon Valley startup.

In a good year, he gets to spend ten nights sleeping on the snow high in the mountains.

He has been making beer and mead for many years.

John Pipino, Doblin's most senior employee, and jack of many trades, joined Doblin in 1988. Until our recent merger with Monitor, Pip directed Doblin's technology strategy and managed the infrastructure, and is therefore the principal author of the firm's enterprise systems for case management, secondary research, social science research and innovation tracking. He has also led our recruiting efforts and Doblin facility management. Currently he continues to develop the firm's research tools and also participates in projects as a team leader or team member with a focus on writing and technology.

In addition to his work in innovation and strategy, Brian spent four years working as a screenwriter for the L.A. film industry. He is fascinated by the power of narrative as both a didactic model and change agent, helping to frame complex events, bridge perspectives, and illustrate future states.

Brian holds an undergraduate degree from Amherst College.

Brian began his professional career as an actor, playing such notable roles as “Kyle the Cheater” in an after-school special on plagiarism. The director felt Brian’s portrayal was too “dark and brooding,” and cut his role back sharply. Brian still feels a serious topic was treated with inappropriate levity.

Brian wishes he didn’t like fine food and finer beverages as much as he does.

Brian Quinn works as a program leader for Doblin, helping clients define, develop, and launch innovations. His experience in working with clients across a broad array of sectors, ranging from healthcare to private equity to heavy manufacturing, gives him a deep appreciation for challenging industry orthodoxies and seeking breakthrough change. He has expertise in corporate and business unit strategy, and has lead programs in companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 multi-nationals to help them grow successfully.

Her previous operating experience includes leadership of various internal regional and global firm functions for Monitor Group including revenue management, capacity planning and deployment, and talent acquisition and development. She has also been involved in a variety of internal change management initiatives and acquisition integration efforts.

Melissa has an Honors BA in business from the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario, where she was an Ivey Scholar.

Melissa Quinn is both a client relationship manager and an internal leader responsible for attracting and developing great talent in Monitor's innovation practice.

With clients, Melissa focuses on innovation and organizational challenges. She has worked in a broad range of industries, including financial services, telecommunications, metals, high tech, health care and agriculture. Her experience also spans a range of strategic issues, but she has a particular interest in innovation, organization and leadership challenges, and change management.

He enjoys snorkeling as well as a crushing game of volleyball, and is careful to never confuse the two.

His passion still lingers for the analog version of Dungeons and Dragons (the distant ancestor of most on-line games).

Matthew is a member of the secondary research team at Doblin. He is responsible for quite a bit of the heavy lifting behind the scenes for Doblin's research efforts.

His expertise in on-line research includes financial and product trends, business practices, changing consumer preferences, and just about anything else related to Doblin's casework, and he is a regular contributor to the firm's research methods and tools. Matt has worked as patent paralegal and as a research specialist for a private financial library. He holds a BA degree in theater with additional studies in physics and Spanish, and an MFA degree in theater from DePaul University.

Samantha has a Master of Design degree from the IIT Institute of Design and a BFA in visual communications from the University of Arizona. She is fluent in Spanish.

She discovered to her dismay that a regular running schedule and graduate school were not well matched.

Samantha's interest in the connections between innovation and social causes will surely find an outlet in Chicago, likewise her interests in the cultural diversity of food.

Samantha Ruiz is a project consultant and design planner with a strong interest in research, analysis, and synthesis. With her strong background in communications, she explores ways to distill Doblin research into insights and to communicate these in the best ways possible. She often works in a research capacity, helping to plan, conduct, and evaluate primary research, and then works to visualize the results and develop supporting prototypes.

Sam has held a variety of design, communication, and research positions, often with an emphasis on wellness, health, and health care delivery. She has developed workshop curricula with connections to innovation and design.

channel. This experience, initially as an interface designer and ultimately as Design Director, led her to prefer the strength and value of narratives in learning experiences over evaluations of specific data points.

She received her Master of Design degree from the Institute of Design, a graduate experience she pursued to explore new boundaries for the field of design.

Now that grad school is over, Ruth has discovered mysterious segments of time called "evenings" and "weekends."

Ruth has a twin sibling in the video game industry but has only one really good 'spooky twin story,' which she's happy to relate if you are interested.

Ruth Schmidt is a design strategist, extending her communication and information design skills into new areas in support of Doblin's work in research, strategy, and ideation. She believes that designers contribute their best efforts when they are involved in the full life cycle of a project. Equally comfortable with the verbal and the visual, she helps to conceive, develop, structure, present, and follow through on concepts developed by the firm.

Her curiosity piqued by a BA in Semiotics at Brown University, Ruth became interested in the grey areas of human behavior and the mechanics of design. She began her career in e-learning systems at Roger Schank's Institute for Learning Sciences just as that field was emerging, and she was able to experience first hand the translation of core elements of an established discipline into a new delivery

She is a itinerant jewelry designer still seeking her niche.

Hillary absorbs pop culture through any means other than directly.

Hillary Schuster is an information designer, concept visualizer and researcher at Doblin. She handles the production of workshop and meeting materials, and contributes concept visualizations, images images and models in support of storytelling and narrative development.

In pursuit of her degree at the IIT Institute of Design, she concentrated on prototyping and design language in an effort to understand the gap between ideas and implementation. Hillary's engineering degree from Michigan reflected and extended her interests in math and science.

More recently, he has been helping clients embed Innovation, Sales and Marketing Excellence capabilities in their organizations. The nature of this work, founded upon Monitor’s topline-growth platform, spans the domains of corporate strategy, product strategy development and execution, organizational structure, training and tools. 

Geoff received his B.A., with honors, in English literature and creative writing, from Dartmouth College. He also holds an MBA with honors from Harvard Business School.

Though such a spot would clearly be in the middle of the ocean, Geoff routinely asserts that he grew up between Canada and the UK.

And as the father of four young sons, a great deal of innovation is required in his home life too.

Geoff Tuff is a senior partner of Monitor Group and a leader of Monitor's Innovation and Sustainability practices. Since first joining Monitor in 1992, he has helped clients in a variety of industries including pharmaceuticals, medical devices, consumer products, beverages, information services, financial services, telecommunications, metals, and both commodity and specialty chemicals. He currently manages some of the firm's largest client relationships. Throughout his career, he has been instrumental in developing some of Monitor’s core methodologies related to driving topline growth for clients.

In the past, Geoff's project work has included new product development systems, product launch strategies, local-market entry strategies, new distribution route structures, and sales strategies.

Jeff has worked on cases in several industries for diverse clients. He holds a Master of Design degree from the IIT Institute of Design (ID), and completed his BS degree in design at the University of Cincinnati. Recently he's enjoyed a return to ID on the other side of the fence, serving as an Adjunct Professor.

Jeff has devoted a (possibly ill-advised) portion of his memory to hip-hop trivia, and sample spotting...

He would love to have more time to explore the incredible National Park System of our country (and since we're wishing…would prefer to drive from park to park in a yellow '73 BMW 2002)

Jeff Tull is a Program Leader and occasional Project Leader at Doblin. He develops innovative concepts for client offerings, participating directly with the research analysis to help craft concrete insights and direction. Building on his experience in design, product development, and strategic planning, Jeff believes that the most powerful innovations are created by truly multi-disciplinary teams. A systems enthusiast, he excels at connecting the dots in complex problems and enjoys wrangling with ambiguity.

John has a Master of Design degree from IIT Institute of Design, and an undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Willamette University.

John continues to find new connections between his interests in design and Jazz.

During Chicago's glorious summers John can be found on his bike exploring the city in search of his favorite food: tacos.

John Vollmer helps develop compelling concepts and customer experiences by making research insights tangible.

Before joining Doblin, John held positions in interaction design and web development where he strove to create interactions that were easy, effective and enjoyable. His search for a deeper, more structured approach to problem solving and to understanding people, business and technology led him first to the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago, and now Doblin. John has had the opportunity to contribute to projects in the areas of healthcare, energy efficiency, financial services, mobile commerce, media and entertainment.

In addition to his consulting responsibilities, Jeff helps to manage the firm’s New York office. He holds a B.Com from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Jeff lives in Chelsea with his wife Laxmi and son Charlie.

An avid skier and snowboarder, Jeff once spent a winter traveling to over 30 ski resorts across the US and Canada in a 1976 VW bus. On occasion, he misses those times very much.

Jeff Wordham is a partner of Monitor Group and a program and relationship manager within Doblin.
At Doblin, Jeff helps clients to define their innovation strategies, build new businesses and enhance their overall capabilities. Jeff works across a range of industries, but has particular expertise in life sciences and healthcare.
Jeff brings to Doblin over 14 years of consulting experience, having advised clients on corporate strategy, marketing strategy, organizational design, leadership and operations. During this time he has also lived and worked in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.