Christine Flanagan

Chris is student experience lab director at the Business Innovation Factory (BIF). She also serves as a member of the senior leadership team and and has been with the organization since its inception in 2004. Additionally, she curates BIF's annual Collaborative Innovation Summit, named by Mashable as one of the 'Top 7 Places to Watch Great Minds in Action.' 

Within the Student Experience Lab, Chris uses the innovation and design process to develop and test new education models, solutions and opportunities. She is responsible for developing and implementing BIF's student-centered strategy in education; developing an ongoing, research-based understanding of the characteristics and opportunities for system transformation in education; catalyzing a national education transformation conversation; and developing and working with an action-oriented network of engaged innovators and organizations that want to go up the education transformation learning curve together. 

Chris also pioneered a new discipline called Student-Led Participatory Design, which has since become part of the lab’s core offering and involves directly engaging students in real-world R&D where students across the country learn principles of design thinking and apply them in real-time to solve education challenges. With each initiative, BIF and its partners have come to rely on student work to improve student outcomes and transform the student experience. Student-led R&D, Chris believes, holds the key to systems-level change.

Chris' previous life includes more than fifteen years of marketing and communications experience, acting as a director at the  boutique communications firm Foghound, where she had the privilege of counseling Fortune 100 clients on integrated communications, marketing initiatives, and enterprise social media strategies, leveraging experiential, digital and mainstream communications practices. Prior to consulting, she served as director of advertising for Nortel Networks where she managed the company's global advertising programs. She received her B.A. in English from the State University of New York, Albany.

Chris regularly writes and speaks on the topics of innovation, design thinking, student voice and education disruption. When she's not at the Lab experimenting with education innovation, or home with her brilliant kids putting her (almost) culinary degree to good work, she's dreaming of hiking the mountains of northern Utah.