The Social Equity Venture Fund (S.E.VEN) has just invested $100,000 to research the age-old question of what factors lead some entrepreneurs to success and others to failure, only this grant is one of the few to support research on this topic in the developing world.

S.E.VEN has awarded this money to Harvard poverty expert Michael Kremer, as a part of a total of $400,000 that it has invested in researchers working on enterprise based solutions to poverty. Kremer's study will look at entrepreneurs in both Kenya and India to "understand who these individuals are, what in their environment contributes to their development as entrepreneurs, and social, institutional and personal barriers to further growth." These two countries were chosen because "most of those subsisting on less than a dollar a day live in South Asia and Africa."

Clearly, there is something different about entrepreneurship in these environments or there would be no reason for studying them in addition to all of the research that has been done on entrepreneurship in more formal markets.

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Guest blogger Apoorva Shah, a recent graduate of Rice University, is currently a Wagoner Scholar working with Ashoka: Innovators for the Public to research the influence of social entrepreneurship on public policy. Currently in São Paulo, Brazil, he wrote this post from Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Moses Lee's recent post on scaling BoP ventures raised the important and complex issue of defining "scale" in cross-sector approaches to development. What happens when "increasing business transactions that positively impact the lives of the poor" means that BoP businesses begin to enter the realm of government?

For example, many businesses work in fields traditionally relegated to the public sector - public health, education, environmental protection, electrification, etc. To scale, should the BoP venture work with government or proceed without it, and what are the subsequent consequences?

In Sri Lanka, Ashoka Fellow Lalith Seneviratne works with a network of local entrepreneurs to provide small-scale biomass gasification systems to rural villages inaccessible to the national electricity grid. The systems are fueled by the fast-growing Gliricidia wood, which is endemic to Sri Lanka and can be easily grown by villagers. Because the process of entering the national grid was slow and bureaucratic, local private actors such as Seneviratne decided to act independently to provide an environmentally friendly source of energy to rural citizens.

Yet in the past five years, the government electricity grid has expanded by 13% to reach 80% of the country's population, and according to Seneviratne, only about 5% of Sri Lankans will ultimately remain off the national grid. So how should Mr. Seneviratne define scale for his venture? He has two options:

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