Yelena Abovyan received her MA degree in international economics in 2004 from Russian-Armenian State University in Yerevan. Her second MA degree is in accounting and audit granted by International Accountancy Training Center (IATC) Educational Fund in 2005 in Armenia. She started her career in 2004 at a local retail start-up, which ultimately developed from a project of introducing modern retail practices into operations of a shop to the biggest retail and distribution chain in Armenia, “STAR”. In 2009 she left the company in the position of Development Director and joined the team of newly established mobile operator, subsidiary of “Orange / France Telecom”, a multinational telecommunications corporation. In “Orange” Yelena was responsible for frontline and back-office operations in sales and customer service, covering a wide range of support activities, from staff training and development to digitalization of operations and introducing innovative services to internal and external customers. In 2014 she headed the department of products and services, responsible for the overall customer proposition, product portfolio, and marketing strategy. Yelena joined the IDeA Foundation in 2016 in the position of Chief Operations Officer and is currently managing the portfolio of projects in each of their life cycle/maturity stages, setting up new standards and approaches in running Project Management Office and central operations of the foundation.