Heather Fraser

Heather Fraser

Program
BBA '79
Founder,
Company
Vuka Innovation and Vuka Works
Career Background

Heather Fraser is a lifelong business strategist, innovator and business designer, with a passion for human insight, bold ideas, and turning those game-changing ideas into business.

She is devoted to empowering innovators and entrepreneurs realize their ambitions through the practice of business design - a discipline that combines human-centred design and business strategy. Building on her 25-year track record of building businesses at Procter & Gamble and in creative service agencies, she brought these worlds together in academia in 2005 and led the development of this discipline. Over 7 years, Heather taught business design to over 3,000 students and executives and publishing the first book on business design. She has advised organizations around the world to put business design to work for them, boosting their capacity to collaboratively create and deliver breakthrough ideas through this strategic and design-inspired approach.

In 2012, Heather opened Vuka Innovation to help organizations unlock their innovation potential through the practice of business design. Based on this work, she published an advanced second edition of my book, Design Works: A Guide to Creating & Sustaining Value through Business Design.

In her ongoing quest to democratize innovation and entrepreneurship and help more people unlock their potential to turn inspired ideas into business, Heather founded Vuka Labs. Their first product, Vuka Works, is a massively scalable do-it-yourself business design tool for anyone who wants to turn their inspired idea into business.

In a world of VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity), she believes one letter changes the way we head into the future. Vuka (with a K) is a Zulu word that means 'to awaken and stir into action'. That's the spirit of everything she does.

You can learn more about her book at fraserdesignworks.com and this new platform at www.vuka.works.

Specialties

 Innovation, Business Design, Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Branding & Marketing