Elizabeth Kovats teaches innovation and design at Berkeley Haas. She has created new courses at Berkeley Haas and BerkeleyLaw in the area of design thinking. Elizabeth served as the Director of the Berkeley Roundtable on Applied Innovation and Design, BRAID, and she regularly collaborates with innovation executives based in Silicon Valley. Her area of interest is in design and ethics, and how we can design products and/or processes to advance the common good.

Prior to academia, Kovats worked in the high technology industry. Joining a start-up in the telecommunications industry, BigBand Networks, as the eighth employee in the U.S. office, she helped scale operations, ultimately leading to a Company IPO. She attended graduate school at the Jesuit School of Theology, focusing on philosophy and design, and studied creative writing at the University of Arizona and the University of Iowa.