Business strategies for entrepreneurial small firms

This paper addresses the issue of the nature and context of business strategies in entrepreneurial small firms. It examines a number of existing models of strategic planning and suggests that they cannot adequately cope with environmental uncertainty. Developing the idea that effective strategy formation is processual in a stochastic environment, the paper proposes four alternative high‐level approaches (Meta strategies) entrepreneurial firms might use to cope with uncertainty. These stress the notion of evolution as a direction rather than a series of staged events. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.