Serving as Head of Incubation, McKaye Black is passionate about finding, accelerating, testing, and scaling new approaches that positively impact consumer financial wellbeing. Bringing her experience as an engineer, designer, educator, and business leader, McKaye is responsible for leading the Lab and i3 programs, expanding the impact of Filene’s Incubation portfolio, and building partnerships that support credit union partners.
Before joining Filene, McKaye led strategy and external innovation at the C1 Innovation Lab at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Montana. In this role, she created structures and pathways to enable innovation, trained teams in human-centered design, and built partnerships with the academic and entrepreneurship communities to develop new solutions that positively affect health. Prior to C1, McKaye served as an innovation consultant supporting new product design and development across industries, led global business analytics and operations practices, launched a social enterprise in Peru, and contributed to academic research in the field of wildfire combustion.
McKaye is a graduate of the MMM Program at Northwestern University, holding an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management and a MS of Design Innovation from the Segal Design Institute. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from Brigham Young University. Driven by her belief in the impact education creates in societies, she has also served as Adjunct Professor at Southern Methodist University’s Master of Arts in Design & Innovation (MADI) Program, and trained innovators at Northwestern University, National Institutes of Health, and other leading organizations across the country.
In her free time, McKaye enjoys spending time with her husband and dog, Daisy, planning her next trip, and performing music as an alto saxophonist and vocalist.
