When we think of small businesses compared to large corporate behemoths, we view small businesses as the underdog. These companies simply don’t have the scalability of their giant competitors. Take Amazon, for example, and its ability to undercut traditional bookstores based on price and economies of scale.

However, if we think back to the beginning, Amazon started small (more specifically, one-man-in-his-garage small), which is pretty small by anyone’s standards. How do such companies manage to grow, and how can today’s small businesses drive innovation? Through disruption.

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Disruptive innovation is a mass-level, non-institutional change. At its core, it threatens the status quo and is usually borne out of small, non-hierarchical groupings. Structural change and disruption take place in large, traumatic upheavals, which uniquely benefit small, loosely-organized groups.

In smaller organizations, where each person is more likely to wear multiple hats, specialization is practically non-existent due to the need of being the jack of all trades. This leads to a greater flexibility and willingness to change fundamental approaches. A specialized method of solving problems is a recipe for orthodoxy and thinking that any deviation from the norm is impractical.

Also, the ties between those who run small businesses are most often not economic, but predicated on other social ties. Small businesses, including start-ups, are often formed among friends and family, rather than among a group of specialists in a particular field. This allows them to harness the self-motivating forces of loyalty and genuine ownership of the product, giving them that extra drive to overcome any potential hurdles.

Small businesses, when faced with an unusual problem (and when you’re developing the next big thing in your garage, there’s no such thing as a usual problem) tend to find unusual solutions to it. In larger organizations, each possible new solution has to be passed up the corporate ladder, being distorted and/or diluted each time it’s passed up or down the chain. This delays and usually weakens any adoption of new ideas. Furthermore, the employees in large organizations often resist new methods of their own accord, preferring habitual but non-optimal solutions.

Mass adoption of new methods of socializing, doing work or making money is never the result of the types of calculation that are common in the boardroom. Small organizations tend to be more agile and to seek unorthodox, innovative answers, while larger ones tend toward standard solutions to standardized problems.

Every professional was once an amateur, every expert was once a beginner and every successful company was once a small start-up.

Source: Mark Evans is the CEO of Dreamscape Networks. Over the past two decades, he has been creating, running and pioneering successful businesses across Australia and other parts of the globe.