PopTech is a global community of innovators working together. They consider that we live in an era in which humanity’s capabilities—and our challenges—are progressing faster than most of us can comprehend. As we confront the major issues of our century, we’ve never had better tools at our disposal, or a more pressing need to use them wisely. Yet most efforts to create positive change remain locked in ‘silos of excellence’: public health experts talk (mostly) to other public health experts; designers talk to other designers; technologists talk to other technologists, and so on. This approach slows the spread of innovation from field to field, limits our awareness of what tools are even available, and throttles the pace of change. PopTech takes a different approach. They bring innovators together from many different fields—science, technology, design, corporate and civic leadership, public health, social and ecological innovation, and the arts and humanities, among others—in a network that complements the silos. They convene this community in intimate, peer-level gatherings where participants can share their most provocative questions and their most promising new ideas, and begin to work together on new approaches to some of the world’s toughest challenges. In so doing, we constantly seek out the ‘genius in the white spaces,’—insights that can only be discovered when people from very diverse disciplines come together, and concepts from one field are ‘mashed up’ with those from another. Website: http://www.poptech.org/ Soft robots