Christopher Ireland

Christopher spent most of her career as CEO/Partner at Cheskin, a consulting firm that emphasizes innovation through a deep understanding of people, culture and change. She is noted for her ability to create simple explanations of complex human behavior and to translate those insights into effective design and development strategies.

Christopher's primary area of focus has been consumer-driven technology. Her experience in this area includes both exploratory and developmental design research and strategy for Microsoft, HP, Intel, Motorola and Apple. To maintain her sanity and perspective, she also consulted to companies offering less complex fare including Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Gap and Levi's.

After two decades of serving Fortune 500 clients and bootstrapped startups, Christopher and her partners sold Cheskin. Since then she has focused on teaching at CCA and Stanford. Christopher has an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. She co-authored Rise of the DEO with Maria Giudice and China's New Culture of Cool. She speaks about innovation, cultural change and most recently robots, at leading universities and design conferences.