• Project Rose
• Extraordinary Experiences
• Open Gym

These ventures are expected to raise over £10 million for Cancer Research UK over the next few years.

Project Rose

Lizze McLean started Project Rose when she was 13 years old and her mum was diagnosed with breast cancer. For a cost of £2.50, students in secondary schools and colleges can pre-order silk roses that are delivered anonymously to their friends or secret love on Valentine’s Day.

Project Rose

Open Gym

Open Gym is a network of outdoor fitness groups, providing weekly exercise classes in locak parks across the UK. Qualified fitness coaches provide one hour workouts every week and all the profits go to Cancer Research UK.

Open Gym

Extraordinary Experiences

Extraordinary Experiences is a national raffle venture that could win you a “money can’t buy” experience of a lifetime.

Extraordinary Experiences

What Next?

In September, we will hold an event for everybody in the community to get together, celebrate our progress, and help Cancer Research UK decide what should happen next. You can get involved with this now by joining the discussion in the “What Next?” forum.

Clare Cotton explains the OVC

Towards the end of the evening, David Simoes-Brown from NESTA announced, to an excited crowd, which ventures had been selected by Cancer Research UK to enter the final phase of the OVC:

• CRUK “Quit Smoking” Patches
• Kids of Steel
• Open Gym - a network of outdoor fitness groups across the UK
• Sail for Life
• What Money Can’t Buy - The Time of Your Life!

In the days before the event, we also ran a community vote where we asked you to choose your favourite ventures. After announcing the judges’ choices, we revealed which venture had won the community vote and would be joining the above ventures in the next phase: Project Rose.

David Simoes-Brown with Project Rose

How can I get involved?

The shortlisted ventures are working closely with Cancer Research UK to develop their businesses. However, they need your help! The ventures need to do research, build websites, spread the word, network, and more. Do you have a skill you could lend to a venture? Could you donate some time? Let the community know by posting in the Help Out section of the site.

Resources

Previously, venture resources could only be created by and shared with the venture team. Now, resources can be created by and shared with everyone in the Open Ventures community. (All existing resources will still be visible only to the venture team.) As a venture team member, you can now share your plans with the community. As a community member, you can now share interesting media or relevant websites.

Discussions

Previously, you could not comment on ventures like you could on ideas. Now, each venture has their own discussion forum to which everyone can contribute. As a venture team member, you can use these forums to ask for opinions or advice. As a community member, you can leave comments and interact with the venture team.

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.

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!

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.

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!

Size matters.

mo.jo steins are unusually capacious: they have the ability to hold upwards of 3 cups of coffee. For the chance to get your own, keep an eye out for future announcements involving steins. In the meantime, check out the venture Alexandra is involved in: CR-UK “Check ‘em” underwear (you can also see the original idea).  Kylie, bras and boxers. Surely a good thing.

Brainstorm: how do we allow people to give and get something back?

First through the door was Kirk Wilson, the man behind mySocialInvestment (here’s the original idea). He wants to put a ‘Social Investment Account’ on your online banking page, which would be linked to a web marketplace for one-click donations, social investment and volunteerism. I asked Kirk a few questions about his venture.

RV: Kirk, how did you come up with the idea for mySocialInvestment?

KW: The basic idea of managing charitable donations along with money management came as you might expect whilst I was using online banking. I thought how great it would be if I could just review online how my ‘investments’ into charities and social enterprises were doing in terms of social benefit right there on the site, whilst I’m already securely logged-in. All the other ideas around making the donation and volunteering experience more engaging and interesting come from personal experience of finding these activities to be less fulfilling than expected when there is no further interaction.

RV: How did you get involved with the Open Ventures Challenge?

KW: In January I took part in a NESTA event on intellectual property, and part of the presentation was about the OVC and the innovative IP agreement on which it is based. For me it was an easy decision to enter my idea into the competition, as I’m very interested in all things Open Source, and was looking for a way to develop the idea in collaboration.

RV: What are the next steps for mySocialInvestment?

KW: Although I have some ideas about how this will work with banking products, we will need a bank to help us work out exactly what a feasible technical model will look like; and we also need to develop a demonstration website that will showcase some of the innovative content ideas and website tools suggested by the OVC community. Receiving CR-UK help to network with the banks and financial support for web design would be a huge boost.

Once everybody had arrived, Stew explained what we were doing there. We were going to brainstorm business ideas which could generate millions of pounds to help beat cancer.

Are you a hippy or secret squirrel?

Brainstorm: how do we engage with professional men?

After brainstorming, we all awarded gold stars to our favourite ideas. The following ideas got 5 or more stars:

• Help them meet: people who donate virtual goods and people who want something for their donation
• Bank interest automatically goes to charity
• Investment competition. After X years, the bottom performers give their gains to CR-UK
• Internet treasure hunt. Companies taking part let clues be put on their websites. This drives traffic to their sites, so they pay to be part of the competition
• A social network for people who have passed away due to cancer. You donate and buy virtual goods from the profile page

Today, we’ve got some more improvements for you:

• We’ve improved how ideas are sorted by popularity. Previously, an idea with just one 5 star vote would be ranked higher than an idea with very many 4 star votes. We now apply some statistics to ensure that ideas with many high ratings are ranked as the most popular. (For the geeks amongst us, we use the lower bound of a Wilson score confidence interval: Evan Miller provides a clear explanation of how this works.)
• You can now sort ideas by the date they were created.
• When you comment on an idea, you’ll automatically start watching the idea. This means that we’ll email you when there is another comment or the idea changes. Of course, this is optional — if you don’t want email updates then just uncheck the box when you post a comment.

We’d like to improve how ventures work and we’d love to hear your thoughts on this. What do you like about ventures? What do you hate about ventures? What do you think we should do next? Please do get in touch with your feedback and suggestions.