But here's the catch: a handful of lone entrepreneurs producing a few industry-making Big Ideas can't execute this second option.

Victory, the experts say, will not go to lone entrepreneurs but to those companies with the most powerful friends.

Many more are run by a lone entrepreneur, often a refugee from one of the big pharmaceutical companies, working out of a spare bedroom on a laptop.

Those were the wild and woolly years of the cosmetics industry, when lone entrepreneurs began by filling jars in their kitchens, and finished with global enterprises.

Robert B. Reich, professor of political economy at Harvard University, also thinks the nation has put too much store in the myth of the lone entrepreneur, much as it once worshipped the pioneer and the lone cowboy.

Philip Roscoe asks whether our expectations of the lone entrepreneur are unrealistic.

From big pharmaceutical companies selling hormone replacement therapy to lone entrepreneurs developing an electric cooling blanket, advertisers are looking to profit from what Ms. Cone, a former advertising and direct-marketing executive, calls the "mega-consumer" generation.

After 45 minutes, as the passengers sat frustrated and restless, fretting about missed appointments and irate employers, a lone entrepreneur made his way through the cars yelling, ballpark style: "Call your offices, call your families.

In 2004, approximately 900 magazines will begin publishing, and the vast majority of them will come from lone entrepreneurs, said Samir Husni, a professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi who tracks new magazines.

But it's also easy for any lone entrepreneur to serve up anywhere, even at a tiny stand.