We launched the Open Ventures Challenge in early October. In these past few months, the Open Ventures community has come up with 130 ideas (at the time of writing) for new ventures that could generate £10m to help beat cancer.

That’s a lot of ideas. So many, in fact, that our ideas page was beginning to feel unwieldy. There was no easy way to find highly rated ideas and it wasn’t clear where conversations were happening. So we’ve made some improvements to the ideas page:

• You can sort ideas by activity, rating and number of votes. You can also choose to see more than 10 ideas per page.
• When an idea receives a comment it moves to the top of the activity list.
• Your own ideas appear highlighted. If you want to see how your ideas are doing in relation to others, you can increase the number of ideas shown on the page and quickly find your own.

Separately, in order to help you keep track of our blog posts and site updates, we have added a list of the latest blog posts to the right hand side of the OVC website.

As always, if you have any feedback or suggestions please do get in touch.

As you’ll already know if you attended our Ideas Bazaar, we’ve entered Phase 2 of the Open Ventures Challenge.  This is when we hope you, the Open Ventures community, will take some of the great ideas you’ve posted and start making them a reality.

That’s an ambitious goal.  You’ll need to team up, to find people with all the skills a successful venture needs.  You’ll need to work closely together and coordinate your efforts.

That’s why, on Monday, we released the new version of the OVC website, with some new features that we think will really help with this phase of the Challenge.

• Avatars!  You can upload a photo of yourself, to help people put a face to your name.
• Create ventures and invite people to join your team.
• Share resources such as documents and bookmarks within a team.
• A team action list so you can keep track of your venture’s progress.
• More information on the home page about how the Challenge works and where we’re going from here, including face-to-face events we’re planning.

We’ve also made sure the site works much better for anyone unlucky enough to have to use Internet Explorer 6 as their browser.  If you can, though, please do upgrade to a modern browser, as there are some features we just can’t support for IE6.

We’re still working hard to bring you even more features and make the site even easier to use.  I’m going to provide fairly regular announcements on this blog when we add new stuff.

As ever, if you have any comments or suggestions we’d love to hear them!

The Open Ventures Challenge, in aid of Cancer Research UK, is applying open innovation principles to venture creation.

We are looking for ideas that can make a big difference in helping Cancer Research UK beat cancer. They can be independent business ventures, new ventures for an existing company or a new venture for Cancer Research UK to run themselves.

The Challenge will take ideas and people through concept creation, team building, funding and launch.

We are also looking for people and organisations that feel that they have something to contribute. They can run an Innovation Camp, participate in the OVC community or propose ideas and ventures.

Contact or to get more information, ask any questions or offer any thoughts.