What's in a name?

So I realized that one of the themes that interests the contributors of this blog ( and one which I dedicated my entire previous semester at the Institute of Design to...) is the social development aspect of design . It was mostly two projects, one that aimed at creating a sustainable local organic food production system in Chicago, and the other relating to social networking in the slums of Powai, India...that were responsible for hooking me to the subject (…stay tuned there will be more on those later…). A class that I took parallely and which significantly helped in shaping my opinions on the matter dealt with the subject of social entrepreneurship. And for a long time I was fascinated with the idea of an enterprise that creates both social and economic value for all stakeholders. And then I came across an article (an extremely tedious one, which I shall not recommend for light reading …) by Daniel Hjorth and Bjorn Bjerke on Public Entrepreneurship.
The authors view was that social entrepreneurship considers social problems as mainly economic problems that require a better management. And that very often it fails to consider the local history and culture by proposing a set template of solutions for widely varying cultures and values. The article proposes two shifts, one from social to public and the other from consumer to citizen. This new approach is taken as a shift from social entrepreneurship to public entrepreneurship.
In my opinion a shift is not really necessary. But creating a place for public entrepreneurship was. It is true that social entrepreneurship focuses on solving social problems through economic solutions, but that does not demean the concept. There are many problems that can be solved with better products and services that create social and economic value for both the entrepreneur as well as the society. Public entrepreneurship on the other hand though has obvious social benefits but might lack success in the absence of adequate incentives. I understand this problem as mainly that of the lack of incentives to bring about a change. Social entrepreneurs because they are external individuals and entities usually find their incentives in economic gains, while public entrepreneurship because it deals with citizen participation finds its incentives in other things important to a group of people.
Let me clarify the idea of public entrepreneurship with an example (…which will be appropriately nostalgic for the members of this blog…) let’s take you to Ahmedabad… to a small restaurant based on a unique philosophy - the Seva café. The concept of Seva is rooted in the philosophy of karma yoga, and the word essentially means “service without expectations of any kind”. It would be wrong to call this place a restaurant. In their own words it’s more of a home, and they don’t just offer you locally produced wholesome meals, they offer you an experience. But what’s most interesting about this cafe is the 'contribute as you wish' model on which they are based. This means you decide how much you pay for your meal at the end of your experience here (this generally tends to be a generous donation of course). But it also means that participation is considered a bigger contribution than mere donation. The money gifted at the end of the meal is essential for sustaining the cafe but the food is truly intended as a gift and an essential part of the cafe is volunteerism. People and families volunteer to cook food, buy vegetables, wash the dishes...and yes it works. It works because the culture supports it. People participate because of the existence of values that help them to understand the concept. I don’t know if this would be replicable anywhere else and even be as successful if it wasn’t Gujarat, the birthplace of Gandhi. It’s true that this structure does not fit into the traditional notions of social entrepreneurship …but at the same time I can’t help feeling the importance of its existence…what do you think?