Small Businesses are Entrepreneurship - Essay Example

The paper presents arguments in favor of this statement and attempts to explore various dimensions of this statement. Discussion To define, “entrepreneurship is the capacity and willingness to undertake conception, organization, and management of a productive venture with all attendant risks, while seeking profit as a reward” (Hatten, pp. 148-149, 2011). A glance at all other definitions of entrepreneurship will verify the fact that entrepreneurship, entrepreneur of entrepreneurial spirit is seen in line, primarily, with the elements of innovation and risk taking.

Without any doubts, large sized companies and organizations create mechanisms and systems to diversify and decrease their risk over the period (Hatten, pp. 148-149, 2011) of time; however, small businesses are the ones that face great deal of uncertainty and ambiguity on a daily basis. Lack of abundant resources, limited funds, threat of competition, limited production capacity, narrow customer base, constraints in terms of conducting marketing research and others are factors that present challenges and risks to small business which are shared by almost all small businesses as well.

Almost half of the new ventures and small businesses in UK and US fail in the first year, which is another proof and manifestation of the uncertainty that is faced by the small business and entrepreneurial ventures (Down, pp. 20-21, 2010). One can consider small businesses as examples of entrepreneurship because they share of the element of ‘need of constant innovation” with other entrepreneurial ventures. Important here to note is that this does not necessarily imply that large businesses can survive without innovation but the fact is that large businesses can delay innovation by using the other resources, competitive advantages and competencies at their disposal (Scarborough, Wilson & Zimmerer, pp.

41-42, 2010). When companies grow big, they develop a loyal customer base and develop other mechanisms to retain customers. Their buyers associate certain level of quality with them and at least, with certain products and services, the buyers face certain switching costs due to which may hold the customers with the company for a longer period (Bridge, O'Neill & Cromie, pp. 263, 2003). Furthermore, when companies grow big, they either outsource the tasks of innovation or create separate departments for the same, and provide them with enough funding to experiment and keep an eye on the changing market trends.

In case of both small businesses and entrepreneurs, there are no separate departments for research and development but the owner and the employees themselves must take out the time for coming up with new ideas and testing them thus creating a unique challenge for them (Lee-Ross & Lashley, pp. 52-53, 2011). Not only that constant innovation is a difficult task for small businesses but also at the same time, they need innovation more desperately than large companies do. As mentioned earlier that large companies with their huge loyal customer base can survive in the market for quite some time since they have other factors to attract their customers; however, in case of small businesses and entrepreneurial ventures, innovation is all that they have to attract and retain their customers (Allen & Meyer, pp.

63-68, 2005). Most small businesses