Doctoral Candidate, Center for Work, Technology and Organizations, and Stanford Technology Ventures Program
Elizabeth is a doctoral candidate at the Center for Work, Technology, and Organizations and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program at Stanford University. She is conducting research on the organizational contexts for human-centered innovation including social networks that facilitate innovation, organizational design for innovation services, and the brokering of innovation work practices in industry. She is currently studying the interplay of design and business in the software industry. Elizabeth is passionate about bringing her interests in design and organizational behavior together in a way that has practical implications in industry and theoretical significance in academia.
While design has always been an interest for Elizabeth, she became interested in the organizational context of design work practices when working at a toy company in San Francisco. She observed both her colleagues and children working collaboratively to create toys to inspire the imagination. She was intrigued by both the diversity of individual approaches to the design process and the contextual issues that influenced these processes.
Elizabeth left industry to pursue a master's degree in mechanical engineering with a focus in product design at Stanford where she focused on illustration as a needfinding methodology for human centered innovation. Following the completion of her master's degree, Elizabeth began her doctoral studies working with Bob Sutton. She has been actively involved at the Institute of Design at Stanford, teaching and conducting ethnographic research in the field of design thinking. Most recently, she was a member of the teaching team during the spring term teaching a course called Creating Infectious Action and is preparing to teach a new course called Clicks to Bricks, Creating Mass Market Experiences during the Fall term. Elizabeth sees teaching as an excellent opportunity to explore innovations in design and organizational behavior education, to consider new applications of design thinking to business, and to prototype areas for future research. When not teaching or conducting research, Elizabeth is prototyping a course and research agenda on the application of improvisation to design thinking.
