The diversity of the crowd at this year’s PopTech was clear to me as soon as I got inside the Camden Opera House, took off my dripping rain jacket, grabbed a cup of coffee and sidled up to a table where I met Makram.

Makram is an imam for a Muslim congregation in Minneapolis, and attended his first PopTech because he’s passionate about social entrepreneurship and making positive changes in his community. I then met Joe, who leads a technology foundation in San Francisco; encountered a friend from college who leads a design consultancy in New York City; and ran into my dentist and his wife (turns out I have a pretty cool dentist).

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Diversity is important at an event like this because it ensures a diversity of ideas, which attracts people from all over the world.

PopTech, in its 18th year, is not a technology conference in the traditional sense. It’s a festival of ideas held in the beautiful coastal town of Camden and inside the cozy confines of the Camden Opera House. This year’s theme was “Rebellion.”

Speakers ranged from Alec Ross, a former adviser for innovation to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Paola Antonelli, design curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art; Bob Sabiston, the animator behind the movies “Waking Life” and “A Scanner Darkly” who turned down three job offers from Steve Jobs because he didn’t want to become a “cog in a big machine”; and Anil Dash, a social media pioneer.

Perhaps the most interesting talk was given by Regina Dugan, vice president of engineering at Google and former director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (better known by its acronym, DARPA) within the U.S. Department of Defense.

Dugan shared her story of a devastating cancer diagnosis at age 9. Her doctors gave her a 10 percent chance of survival.

“I was small, but I understood: It was game on,” she said.

After multiple surgeries and endless days of chemo, Dugan pulled through. The experience, while traumatic, was also formative.

She learned that odds are irrelevant. “If it matters, you take a shot and don’t give up,” Dugan said.

She spoke of her parents’ bedside vigil, which led her into a discussion of what defines love. To answer, she quoted Kahlil Gibran: “Work is love made visible.”

“If you want to find what you love, look inside the hardest thing you do – that’s where it will be,” Dugan said.

A $10,000 STARTUP PRIZE

The Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development has for the past five years held a showcase event where entrepreneurs who have graduated from its Top Gun startup accelerator program pitch their business to a panel of experts and a live audience. The entrepreneurs’ sole reward has been feedback from experts and validation from potential customers.

Next year, however, one entrepreneur will walk away with a $10,000 prize.

“It’s a sign of the increased maturity of the entrepreneurial ecosystem that we’re able to start adding features like this that are available in other, similar kinds of programs,” said Don Gooding, executive director of the entrepreneur center. “It’s 10,000 reasons to love Top Gun.”

In addition to the cash prize, Great Works Internet in Biddeford will also contribute a business services package good for one year.

Blackstone Accelerates Growth, a three-year, $3 million initiative of the Blackstone Charitable Foundation to grow entrepreneurship in Maine, funded the new award.

Jess Knox, Blackstone’s statewide innovation hub coordinator, said the award helps address one problem many bootstrapping entrepreneurs face – access to capital.

The entrepreneur center has been a major recipient of Blackstone funds. Gooding estimates his organization has received $450,000 over the past three years, which has been used to expand the Top Gun program. It has grown from a local effort to train a dozen entrepreneurs in the Portland area to where it now trains 30 entrepreneurs a year in Portland and Bangor. The entrepreneur center is adding Rockland as a third location in 2015.

Blackstone funds also helped create Top Gun Prep, an online version of the accelerator course that has reached another 200 budding entrepreneurs.

The plan, Gooding said, is to make the $10,000 award an annual occurrence, whether that funding comes from Blackstone or elsewhere. Blackstone’s three-year effort will end next June, but Knox said there are ongoing discussions about the program’s future in Maine.

“We are excited about the progress so far, and the partners are in conversations with the charitable foundation about how we could work together in the future,” he said.

Applicants for next year’s Top Gun class must apply by Nov. 18. The showcase event will be held in June 2015.