Web entrepreneurship is emerging as a key building block for economies globally. Against a backdrop of challenging financial landscapes, increased adoption of technology is providing opportunities to connect, co-ordinate and catalyse. In this OpenIDEO challenge, the European Commission’s Digital Agenda Assembly is looking for help identifying ways to improve the environment for online start-ups.

For many citizens in democracies around the world, the ability to cast an election ballot is often a given. But what if you had a disability, difficulties with language or reading, limited mobility or other conditions that excluded you from participating in the election process? In fact many people face a variety of social and technological barriers that impede their ability to cast their ballot privately and independently. In this challenge, OpenIDEO and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation are asking our community to find ways to improve election accessibility for people with disabilities and other limitations. With your help, we’re eager to design new solutions that make the entire voting process – from registering to vote to casting a ballot – accessible for everyone.

OpenIDEO has partnered with Steelcase to explore the topic of revitalising struggling cities around the world. Together we’re looking to design solutions – from entrepreneurship and education to community mobilisation and campaigns – that reinvigorate and help restore areas facing economic decline, population loss, unemployment and erosion of social/civic services or other critical issues. As our global economies become more intertwined and interconnected, we have a unique opportunity to consider ways that we can each bring vibrancy and prosperity to our own neighborhoods, towns and cities.

OpenIDEO has partnered with Amnesty International to challenge all of us to come up with ways to use technology to support those held in or at risk of secret detention, incommunicado detention or detention without trial – human rights abuses often imposed in the name of countering terrorism or national security. Imagine you were arrested and detained indefinitely without being told the accusations against you. What if you were taken and held in a secret location, and denied contact with your family or a lawyer? Addressing the factors that allow such human rights violations to happen can be complex. But there are ways that we, as the OpenIDEO community, can help.

OpenIDEO has turned 1! It’s been an incredible year of connecting and collaborating for social innovation and we are so amazed by the flourishing community that has joined us since our launch. To celebrate our first anniversary, we’re asking you to explore together and identify ways that we can increase our individual and collective social impact over the course of the next year.

OpenIDEO has partnered with the Holistic Social Business Movement (HSBM) of Caldas – a joint venture between the Grameen Creative Lab and the Government of Caldas, Colombia – to consider how social businesses can improve the health of low-income communities in Colombia and around the world. Together, with your help, we hope to develop a set of implementable and high impact solutions to support and promote social business development and improve health in low-income areas like Caldas, where 26% of the population lives in extreme poverty.

Help us close the gap between rural food production and urban food consumption to create more sustainable, happy and healthy communities. OpenIDEO has partnered with the Queensland Government in Australia and the IDEAS Festival 2011 to create a closer connection between local food production and consumption that can make a dramatic impact on sustainability efforts.

OpenIDEO has partnered with the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University to explore new ideas for encouraging bone marrow donation worldwide. Together we’re asking you, the OpenIDEO community, to help us find ways to expand the global network of potential bone marrow donors and support people who are battling leukemia and other blood cancers.

OpenIDEO has partnered with Oxfam and Nokia to explore how mobile technologies can be used to improve maternal health (particularly in pregnancy and childbirth). We’re asking you, the OpenIDEO community, to come up with inspirations and concepts around improving the knowledge and access to maternal health services, specifically where mobile technologies can be used as a tool to aid this. We’re focusing our solutions in low-income countries, such as Burkina Faso and Bangladesh. In many such countries fees for health care prevent millions of mothers from seeking the professional care they need or where under-investment means health works or medicines are unavailable.

OpenIDEO has partnered with Unilever and WSUP (Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor) to explore sanitation issues in Ghana. Together we’re asking you, the OpenIDEO community, to help us come up with sustainable sanitation inspirations and concepts. We'll be focusing on low-income urban areas like Kumasi – the nation’s second-largest city, with a population of more than 1.5 million people.

Early in 2011 a group of global innovation leaders – known as the i20 – will meet for a global innovation summit. They are the principal drivers of national innovation strategies across thirty countries. You can influence their summit agenda. OpenIDEO contributions will be used to help determine priorities and directions for the conference.

Enterprising Schools, an initiative of Gray Matters Capital Foundation, is sponsoring this challenge, focused on increasing the access of low-cost and appropriate learning tools for affordable private schools in India and worldwide. The submissions will contribute to the development of a catalogue of existing tools and would provide inspirational concepts to entrepreneurs who will be encouraged to take them forward and build businesses to provide affordable private schools with much-needed tools and materials. The purpose of this engagement is to provide access to quality learning tools and materials to affordable private schools first in India, and secondarily, worldwide.

Jamie Oliver won the TED Prize wish last year. His wish was to create a Food Revolution in America, to change the way kids eat by teaching them how to cook and what fresh food can do for them. This is all in the effort to help fight to obesity, one of the largest health issues in the United States. OpenIDEO is all about getting a broader group of people to solve some of the world’s most difficult challenges, and this seemed like a great one to kick off with. Click on the active phase in the timeline above to participate.

Our very first challenge was to design the website logo. We launched this challenge internally at IDEO to do two things: beta test our site – and get the crowd designing the logo for us. We asked the crowd: what logos, typefaces, graphics, or sketches inspire you? At the end of the challenge, the winning idea became the logo that you see now!