I'm Jeff Trexler, Wilson Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at Pace University, where I study law and personal identity. It's good to be here at JustMeans. Uncivil Society is a blog I maintain about values, design and corporate identity, with a particular focus on social enterprise. The Blingdom of God is where I write about spirituality and material culture....
Out of the Dragon's Den
The Dragon's Den is a BBC venture capital pitch contest--originally from Japan--that will soon be adapted to US TV as The Shark Tank. As this recent Guardian article notes, last year on the BBC version chef Simon Boyle went on the show to raise money for his social enterprise, Beyond Boyle, a catering service staffed by homeless people.
The result: VCs expressing how much the venture moved them . . . just enough not to make an investment.
"Outside of the Den," said a clearly moved Dragon Peter Jones, "You'd hear me say I'm in." Alas, as they were in the Den, and as the aim is, theoretically, pure profit maximisation, he was going to keep his money firmly in his wallet. The implication was clear: business is business, good causes are good causes, and never the twain shall meet. Business is a ruthless and self-interested affair, to be taken deadly seriously; creating social value is what we do when we are in a sweeter, fluffier, more recklessly altruistic place.
Fortunately this story has a happy aftermath, with Chef Boyle's biz getting money through the Spark Challenge.
Beyond the news itself, the Guardian piece provides a useful example of how the social enterprise world looks from outside. The contrast to commercial investing, the notion that attention to "mundane" business details is "un-charitable," the sense that social enterprise is "anti-charity" and an "anti-Dragon's Den"--all well worth noting, even if it all says less about how charity really operates than how it is perceived.
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