Majority of entrepreneurship literature refers to big businesses while attempting to apply the same concept to small businesses. The concept developed to explain big businesses that could disturb market equilibrium cannot be applied to small business without major conceptual changes. Still many entrepreneurship researchers are not able to resolve this simple but important issue adequately.
I agree with you that the entrepreneurship field is fragmented and there is little consensus However, I believe that it would be beneficial for the field of entrepreneurship to not focus on the size of firms and instead focus on entrepreneurial activity and entrepreneurial opportunities.
In essence, entrepreneurship can be found in both small and large corporation (and also in many other places in society) and the general entrepreneurship theories need to hold for all types of entrepreneurial activities no matter in what type of company.
Agree with Gabriel comments regarding focus on activity and opportunities, if you can get hold of Global Entrepreneurship Monitor(GEM) reports will give you further insight especially regarding the individual.
Also not all businesses started big, hence the development of Intra-entrepreneurship where big business need to be more entrepreneurial within the business environment.
All the Best
Robbie
The distinction between "entrepreneur" and "intrapreneur" in the literature might help for a deeper understanding of the topic. The debate started already in the 1980s and 1990s. More recently, there is an article by Gapp and Fisher (2007) in the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research proposing a three-phase model of innovation based on intrapreneurship.
Intrapreneurship is definded as "the actions of individuals within organisations leading to innovation of product, services or processes" (Gapp and Fisher 2007) based on Antoncic and Hisrich (2003) and Kolchin and Hyclak (1987).
Also, the article of Down and Reveley (2004) about the social formation of
Entrepreneurial Identity might be interesting for your topic.
I agree with Linton, Rapp, and Williams that entrepreneurship has to be assessed by activities and thanks for suggesting literature.
The problems lies with the definition of entrepreneurial small business.. Even though Bolton Committee contends that small business has no influence over price, majority of small business literature assumes entrepreneurship constructs applicable to big businesses without making suitable adjustments. Hence I would like to suggest that entrepreneurial small business definitely have an impact but on a niche markets where those small firms are embedded.
However, price of the products or services offered by small business is not determined by the supply and demand as in economics literature but by the characteristics of social network. where small business owner and customers are linked.
There is no immediate difference, they all start out small. Ones that get large quickly most likely are easily scalable and offer large enough multiple to attract more money. That also means less control.
As told before you should focus on entrepreneurial activity. The key I think is that the definitions of entrepreneurship fuzzy. We are now bussy to develop scales to distinguish different views of entrepreneurship. One of them is about personal (size). But we also found that in healthcare people see entrepreneurship a different way as in commerce. If you are looking of entrepreneurship on small companies, the effectual method (effectuation) might be interesting to you. www.effectuation.org.
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