Pop! Till You Drop

The village of Ipuli is located on a high plateau in the region of Singida in central Tanzania. It has rich red earth, a scattering of mango trees, an inadequate schoolhouse, and no doctor. Tanzania has only one physician for every 20,511 people, a ratio typical of sub-Saharan Africa. Ipuli's women in labor have been trundled 37 miles by wheelbarrow to reach the nearest clinic.

But as soon as early next year, Ipuli will have its own clinic. The Mother-Child Medical Center & Ipuli Medical Training Center is an unusual development project, an international collaboration among several small, independent for-profit and nonprofit entities: local artisans and workers, a regional African NGO, an environmental-engineering firm from Boston, a Paris design firm, and a California-based nonprofit. And all these people got together because of an annual conference called Pop!Tech.

As this magazine hits newsstands in October, Pop!Tech will be assembling some 500 CEOs, artists, authors, and activists for the 10th time, in a restored 19th-century opera house in Camden, Maine. With a mission to "encourage people to take action to change the world by fostering visionary conversations about science, technology, and new ideas," the conference has cemented its reputation as a unique, renewable source of multidisciplinary innovation. From Malcolm Gladwell's Blink to outer-space robots, India's Barefoot College to the first bionic man, Pop!Tech attendees heard or saw it first. The list of attending and sponsoring companies is 100% blue chip: eBay, GE, Google, Lexus, PepsiCo, Sun Microsystems, Target, Yahoo. No one gets a speaker's fee, not even Thomas Friedman.

Pop!Tech's ringmaster, Andrew Zolli, works pro bono too. A futurist whose clients include several of the companies above, he came to Pop!Tech four years ago as a speaker and never left. "This was so unlike anything I'd been involved with," he says. "It's so unlike a conference--it's an event. You see the list of companies attending, yet there's no business being discussed. People come together to get inspired, provoked, put in a place where they're more in touch with their holistic humanity. Increasingly, to find innovation, companies and leaders need to bring their whole persons. Pop!Tech cracks open their heads and hearts and puts them in a different place." Participants make the weekend sound like a fantasy bull session at the most prestigious college in the world, where everyone in your dorm is an artist/athlete/community-service star--with perfect SAT scores. (Fast Company recently signed on to Pop!Tech as a media sponsor.)

One of Zolli's big goals is to extend Pop!Tech's effects around the world and across the calendar. Last year, that meant a one-hour PBS special. This year, it means a live free Webcast of the proceedings and associated free curricula for classrooms. Pop!Tech '06 will also have a net "carbon positive" footprint: Robert Freling, of the Solar Electric Light Fund, says Pop!Tech will invest enough in SELF's rural solar-electrification projects to offset twice the roughly 1,000 tons of carbon it will use.

But what really jazzes Zolli is collaboration. He uses it in his own work, when he assembles teams of experts to help companies create 25-year scenarios. Similarly, he wants Pop!Tech to act as a hub for partnerships that further what is narrowly known as "corporate social responsibility" but might simply be called "humanity." The story of Ipuli is a perfect example, a random confluence of people and organizations from three continents that ends up making the world a little better.

It happened like this: Last year, social entrepreneur Cameron Sinclair spoke at Pop!Tech about Architecture for Humanity, his renowned nonprofit that matches architecture firms with humanitarian projects (over the past year alone, it has designed, implemented, or built 95 buildings in places like the post-Katrina Gulf Coast and South Asia). "It kind of rejiggers your brain," Sinclair says of the conference. "It's a really fun and interesting diverse crowd set in a very intimate environment."