I agree with many of the points you raise, but I think you're trying to unite tangential concerns around a single issue.

The excerpt from your father's paper suggests that our problem solving can be inhibited by our initial impulses about a solution. I agree that this is often the case- most people seem to have a natural resistance against reversing out of a train of thought in order to choose a different branch. Our natural inertia tends to carry us forward. Even when we drive, think how awkward it feels to make a wrong turn and have to reverse down the street in order to correct your error. Obviously on the road this act puts your physical health at risk, so it's not a perfectly sound analogy, but the feeling is similarly uncomfortable with our problem solving tendencies. Most people would prefer to continue to drive and hope/wait to find a turn that will bring them back to the road they know or suspect they should be on.

Considering this tendency in the context of entrepreneurship, I agree that it would be inhibitory, but I also would suggest that the capacity to recognize a wrong turn and act appropriately to correct it is a necessary characteristic of a successful entrepreneur.

After the citations of your father's papers, you move into a sequence about how a self-contained entrepreneurship subculture might result in 'collaborative fixation'. I would argue that a central tenet of the culture, and something that makes it what it is, is that those individuals who self-select into that group de facto bring their own unique personality and background toward working on solutions to problems. If anything, the entrepreneurial subculture puts a premium on thinking differently than your peers, even if those peers also happen to consider themselves entrepreneurs.

Regarding the mini-terrier social network (dibs on that idea, by the way), there are always going to be individuals who copycat models and try and apply them to specified contexts. But, at least in my opinion, that kind of business doesn't exist in the same context as trying to address a Big Problem (then again, I don't have a mini terrier- maybe for some people it is).

I agree with you, again, about your last point regarding context. If a problem is really a Big Problem, it exists across multiple contexts, affecting a number of different people in different ways. That's why it's a Big Problem. As such, it's critical to be able to conceptualize approaching that problem from and through a variety of different contexts, and once again, that's a critical trait for an entrepreneur trying to address a Big Problem.

tl;dr:

After writing this, I'm wondering if it's not so much that the entrepreneurship subculture is inhibiting our capacity to address Big Problems as much as the problems themselves. That's why they're big in the first place right? In order to solve them, a person or group has to be agile enough to abandon their wrong answers, self-aware enough to stay true to the solutions they believe to be tenable, and diverse enough to consider a solution across diverse contexts. I think if anything, the entrepreneurship subculture encourages all these things, and if it were easy to uphold all three characteristics at any time in the face of any problem, entrepreneurship wouldn't be the art that it is.