“We’re getting flooded day in, day out from San Diegans wondering what we are doing about Qualcomm,” said Mark Cafferty, chief executive of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation. “But in reality, this is major shareholder stuff that we as a region aren’t going to solve by holding a rally and saying how great Qualcomm is.”

But how much do big companies actually matter to a city? Not as much as small companies.

Big companies certainly have their benefits. They are generous philanthropists and tend to have more stable employment, so they help cities weather downturns. But over the past 50 years economists have shown that urban growth is much more highly correlated with the prevalence of small companies, suggesting that entrepreneurship is more important than big employers for a city’s long-run prosperity, according to Edward Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard who studies cities.

The good news for San Diego is that it has entrepreneurship in spades. The city is a center of start-up activity and venture capital investment, so while it does not have big recognizable companies — like Los Angeles does with its Hollywood studios or San Francisco with its tech giants — in the long run, Qualcomm or no Qualcomm, the city seems to be doing just fine.

“We’ve lived under the shadow of L.A. and San Francisco for a long time,” said Jerry Sanders, the city’s mayor from 2005 to 2012 and now chief executive of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce. “We have chosen a different path. Small business and smaller organizations are the ones that have made their way in San Diego, and I think that we take great pride in that.”