Born in Bangladesh, Faisal Hoque emigrated to the United States after beginning his entrepreneurially career at age 14. He has since been CEO, Chairman of the Board, advisor to the boards and management of Fortune 500 companies, and has worked closely with such brands as GE, MasterCard, American Express, Northrop Grumman, PepsiCo, IBM, Home Depot, Netscape, Infosys, French Social Security Services, Gartner, Cambridge Technology Partners, JP Morgan Chase, CSC, and more. Hoque has written seven books on management, of which his most recent is Everything Connects – How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability. Hoque has also contributed to the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, BusinessInsider, Huffington Post, BusinessWeek, Mergers & Acquisitions, Forbes, Leadership Excellence, and other fine publications.

During Innovation Navigation, Hoque discussed the notion of innovation as a Matryoshka doll, with a variety of theories and approaches from the innermost personal psychological approach, to broader and broader influences and thoughts. In addition, he spoke the different clusters of innovative people surrounding any effort at innovation. He brought to the show the very interesting idea that successful entrepreneurship and innovation relies enormously on clusters of people who aren’t and never will be direct employees of the innovator. For successful innovation, the manager must work to incentivize and captivate those individuals who do not work for him or her, but are necessary for success, and therein lies one of the most difficult challenges of the innovator.