Introducing PopTech Labs
Harnessing the power of open collaboration to promote world-changing innovations
From mobile health services to the green economy, cloud computing to the Bottom of the Pyramid, opportunities for world-changing innovation abound. PopTech’s latest offering, PopTech Labs, harnesses our ability to convene a diverse network of thought-leaders to foster open collaboration around specific domains of disruptive change.
Each PopTech Lab will bring together a group of carefully chosen experts — including academics, researchers, thought leaders, policymakers, corporate leaders, community stakeholders and other members of the PopTech community — for a year-long “innovation journey.” They will rigorously map the issues, challenges and opportunities around a domain, and develop new incentives to spur on further innovation. PopTech Lab groups will convene in locations around the world, wherever the innovation under study, as well as the communities and areas most likely to be affected, takes them.
The findings of these sessions will be encapsulated in visual maps and other media assets, and released under open license. Lab participants will subsequently collaborate to design specific incentives and paths around critical impediments and key challenges . Such incentives might take the form of prizes and competitions, university programs, and model policy development. These recommendations will be used to guide further development and will be shared with the larger PopTech community and the world at the following year’s conference.
Participation in each Lab is by invitation only, although PopTech network members will be invited to apply. There is no fee for participation.
Our first Lab, on the future of green, “closed loop” materials, and material ecosystems, will convene in the spring of 2010.