Cancer Research UK have selected six ventures to enter the final phase of the OVC, and the community has chosen its favourite. Check out the front page of the website to see which ventures were chosen!

We need your help!

From now on, these ventures will be working closely with Cancer Research UK to develop their businesses. They’ll need to do research, build websites, get the word out, find contacts, and more. Once again, in the spirit of Open Ventures, we’re hoping the community can help them out. In the Help Out section of the site, you can interact with the venture teams, find out what problems they have yet to solve, and help solve them.

Update: as of 11:59pm Sunday 26th April, voting is closed. The venture with the most votes will be announced shortly!

I’m excited to announce that, as of noon on Monday, we have more than twenty great ventures entered into the Challenge! They’re superb ideas, with really high-quality business plans, and I expect the judging panel is going to have a hard time choosing the shortlist.

That’s where you, the Open Ventures community, come in. Nearly all of the venture teams chose to enter their venture into the Community Choice Award, and you can now vote for your favourite ventures on the OVC website.

If there’s a venture you really want to succeed, or you’re in a venture team and want to improve your chances, the Community Choice Award could make the difference. So get voting, and get your friends voting too!

In keeping with the spirit of the Open Ventures Challenge, Cancer Research UK is inviting the community to choose their favourite venture. Providing that the venture is not illegal and does not conflict with the CR-UK ethos (e.g. a cigarette brand is probably out), it will receive a “Community Choice Award” and automatically proceed to the final phase of the OVC.

For your venture to be eligible for the Community Choice Award, your venture leader just needs to include a 150 word summary of the venture on the venture submission form.

Check the box and enter up to 150 words about your venture.

At 9am on April 21st, the day after the submission deadline, the entries for the Community Choice Award will be posted on the website. Each OVC community member will have five votes to cast and can allocate a maximum of two votes on any one venture. The community has from 9am on the 21st until midnight on the 26th to vote for the venture they want to see shortlisted.

We will announce the Community Choice Award alongside the other shortlisted ventures at the Finalist Announcement event on April 28th. The event will take place at Cancer Research UK’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields research facility.

So spread the word and get ready to choose.

Today marks the launch of the Open Ventures Challenge forums: a space to connect and chat with the Open Ventures community.

Win friends and influence people

When we’ve talked at OVC events, a lot of you have said you’d find it useful to have an area for general discussion that wasn’t tied to a particular idea or venture. In the forums, you can swap success stories, help others work through problems, organise local meetups, or just hang out with all the exciting people in our community.

The forums are also the place to go if you have questions about the Challenge process, or have a suggestion for how to improve the site. The mo.jo team will be posting on the forums too, and we can’t wait to hear what you have to say!

If you have any feedback on how the forums work, please post in the discussion thread.

Submit your venture proposals now!

Ventures now have a form where you can upload your venture proposal for consideration by the judging panel.  Only the person who started the venture can fill in the form, but anyone in the venture team can see what’s on it. We’ll post more information about the competition process very soon on this blog. All proposals have to be in by midday on Monday 20th April, so get working on those venture plans!