Young Inventors Head to Geek Camp

"Being able to get across a complicated idea simply and effectively is a skill that you cannot put too much emphasis on," says Erika Jonietz, senior editor at Technology Review magazine, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ms. Jonietz, who also attended PopTech, heads up Technology Review's TR35 program, which honors 35 potential future stars of technology under 35 years of age. At a September conference, the TR35 are literally put under a spotlight and given 90 seconds to tell an influential business and academic audience why their research is worth supporting.

"Ninety seconds isn't a lot of time to get across something that might be extremely technical," she says. "So the best presentations, in my mind, are those where they focus on a single aspect of their work and focus it on what they hope they will accomplish – what it's wider impact on the world will be."

The PopTech boot camp is just in its first year, but Zolli says the early results have been encouraging. "Every single one of them has had meaningful, ongoing, new conversations about new funding sources, new collaborations, new partnerships, other fellowships," he says.

Some of the innovators had been "surprisingly inarticulate" when they arrived for the program, he adds. But by the time they made it to the PopTech stage, they "were incredibly graceful…. They had gone from caterpillar to butterfly."