Putting People First in Healthcare and Finance

When the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a halt in early 2020, McKaye Black (MMM ’19) found herself in the middle of a crisis that demanded fast, human‑centered innovation.
As a senior design and business innovation strategist at C1 (Customer First) Innovation Lab at Blue Cross Blue Shield, she and her team were hearing directly from patients and members about fear, disrupted care, and urgent needs.

These stories came in fast, long before the data caught up.

McKaye and her team moved quickly, equipping nurses and member advocates on the front lines of those conversations with human-centered design tools and creating a way to centralize and synthesize what everyone was hearing so members’ experiences could shape decisions as circumstances changed by the day. She also led partnerships with other researchers across the country to understand needs and build new pathways to care.

 Many of the methods they relied on were ones McKaye had practiced at Northwestern's MBA + MS Design Innovation (MMM) program—a dual-degree program between Northwestern Engineering and the Kellogg School of Management—and those early pandemic days showed her just how valuable they could be in a crisis.

“When you work with a health plan, you get a really unique perspective into the scale of health challenges people are facing,” McKaye said. “Because we used some of the things I learned in MMM, like gathering real-time insights and making sure we were pulling the right people in to solve problems, we were able to make changes that expanded access to care in new settings.”
Today, McKaye brings that same approach to the Filene Research Institute, an independent consumer-finance think tank focused on the credit union industry, where she is head of incubation. She joined the organization in 2024.

“I’m so grateful for the MMM program,” McKaye said. “It refined the way I approach problems, helped me go deeper into innovation in my career, and it gave me some of the best friends that I’ve ever had.”
McKaye entered MMM in 2017 looking to accelerate her career in product development and human-centered design. She earned her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Brigham Young University in 2011, but her first roles after graduation focused on operations and business at scale rather than hands-on R&D.

That was the space she was drawn to.

“I’ve always been interested in developing new technologies and new solutions that improve people’s lives,” she said. “There was this whole world of design and innovation, and I really hadn’t been plugged into it outside of academia.”

MMM gave McKaye an opportunity to build on that interest and develop a more deliberate approach to solving challenging problems.

The program’s central focus on human-centered design—the idea that the most effective solutions begin with deep research into the needs of the people they serve—aligned with the way she approached innovation.

“It’s like applying the scientific method to solution design,” McKaye said. “MMM does such a great job of walking you through the process.”

That process came to life most vividly in Research-Design-Build (RDB), a hands-on studio course that teaches students to use user-centered research to solve complex, real-world problems for industry partners.

The principles she practiced through RDB became a foundation for McKaye’s career: start with the people affected by a problem, understand their needs, bring the right voices into the room, and build solutions that address those needs.

She spent 4½ years at Blue Cross Blue Shield before transitioning to her current role. As head of incubation at Filene, she helps credit union leaders across the country build cultures of innovation that anticipate and meet their members’ future needs. She also leads a fintech incubator focused on developing and testing new technologies that benefit credit unions and their members.
“I’ve used the fundamentals taught by MMM every day for the past seven years,” McKaye said, “especially when bringing people together from different backgrounds to build something new.”