(FORTUNE Small Business) – You'd think the SBA would take a cue from the NEA. Au contraire. Despite years of battles in Congress over the National Endowment for the Art's funding of envelope-pushing art, the Small Business Administration has decided to bank on avant-garde ventures. It has just bankrolled its first independent film, Gristle, a farce that challenges racial stereotypes. Filmmakers Mychal Wilson and Eugene "Geno" Taylor are the first producers to tap the SBA for money since a 1994 ruling lifted a 1930s law prohibiting the agency from funding "opinion molders" such as newspapers and radio stations. Isn't the SBA worried about Jesse Helms and his kind? Nope, says the agency's Los Angeles-district director, Alberto Alvarado. He gave Gristle the green light and says he's excited about backing more indie projects. Film deals will be reviewed case by case and could get loan guarantees for as much as $750,000. Leave artistic merit to the Oscar folks. But for a thumbs-up on a loan application, Alvarado jokes, offer him a cameo.

There may be a little more room for competition on supermarket spice racks, thanks to a landmark decision by the Federal Trade Commission. This spring, it ruled against McCormick & Co., the nation's leading spicemaker, for offering persuasive discounts to retailers if they agreed to stock their shelves--sometimes as much as 90% of the spice section--with mostly McCormick products. The FTC said that McCormick's space grab came at the expense of smaller spice rivals and violated antitrust laws. Known as slotting, the practice of paying for shelf space is common industrywide, but it can price out smaller competitors who often must pay $1,000 to $20,000 per product to appear on supermarket shelves. The McCormick decision could be the first of many that would favor small manufacturers. In that hope, the Independent Bakers Association, the Tortilla Industry Association, and several others are lobbying the FTC for stepped-up antitrust enforcement. Says Irwin Steinberg of the Tortilla Industry Association: "We just want small companies to get a fair shake."

They're still selling cookies, but today's Girl Scouts are setting their sights higher up the corporate food chain. This summer, troops like the Girl Scout Council of Tejas (representing northeast Texas) are running retreats such as Camp CEO. After an afternoon on horseback, scouts can sit around the campfire with top women execs who tell corporate raiding stories. And guests at Camp VIP in Southeastern Pennsylvania last year included a Body Shop franchise owner and the chief exec of a philanthropic organization. Camp tutorials include how to read an annual report and how to visualize yourself as a business magazine cover girl.

So much for Thin Mints.

When the old folks bring out those dog-eared family photo albums, some kids beat a hasty retreat. Not Tim Mikkelsen and Phyllis Wright-Herman. MikWright, their Charlotte, N.C., greeting card company, was born six years ago when the longtime friends began flipping through an old album packed with images of Marge Simpson-esque beehives and funny-looking '50s fashions. Mikkelsen and Wright-Herman soon began pasting copies of the photos onto greeting cards and tucking in some lewd, rude, or politically incorrect greetings.

Now their neosentimental cards and salacious salutations enjoy a cult following and are sold for $3.25 apiece at 1,600 stores in the U.S. and Canada. Will historically imitative giants such as American Greetings and Hallmark be far behind? Maybe they'll stay off the trail this time. MikWright is aiming at a naughty niche, not mass appeal.

Seems every darn American these days wants to call himself an entrepreneur. And Peter Shea would like to put a stop to that. The publisher of Entrepreneur magazine is ready to let loose the dogs of law upon smaller companies with the effrontery to call themselves, say, Young Entrepreneur or Asian Entrepreneur. He has managed to scare off most wannabes with his legal and financial muscle. "We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars establishing a brand name," says Shea. "Why should I let someone come along and destroy it?"

Enter "destroyers" Greg McLemore of Entrepreneurs.com and Scott Smith of entrepreneurPR. After a brief legal standoff during which McLemore made clear his intention and financial ability to fight, Shea dropped his lawsuit last summer. Smith is still fighting for his Sacramento P.R. company, which also publishes Entrepreneur Illustrated, a quarterly he has trademarked. Smith says he's too stubborn and too right to give in. But principles come at a price. Smith says his legal bill is $70,000 and counting. (Editor's note to Shea: At FSB, we like our name just fine.)

Still handing out fliers and setting up sandwich boards outside your store? That's so 20th century. To really ramp up walk-in traffic, you may need the help of a new breed of wireless telecom companies that can lure passersby and turn them into customers. Accurate to within 50 feet, a new system like GeePS.com, out of New Jersey, can pinpoint the location of that cash-happy guy (with a Palm) as he wanders near your shop.

These systems can e-mail, page, or call potential customers walking by, flag them about your store's sale, and even issue them a discount coupon that is good for, say, the next half-hour. The service is free to willing consumers, but merchants pay a flat fee or a sales percentage to join GeePS, which launched in select cities this summer. In the future, window shoppers may actually feel compelled to step inside.

Trying to get a leg up on larger competitors? Introduce a "disruptive technology." That's the New Economy name for the old strategy of inventing something really new, rather than simply making a better version of an existing mousetrap. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen coined the term in his popular book, The Innovator's Dilemma. Big companies with solid products and strong management can still fall prey to businesses hawking new products, Christensen argues, even if those new products aren't immediate hits. Examples: Mainframe maker Digital Equipment was on top of its game until PC makers showed up; Wall Street giants tripped when Charles Schwab introduced the discount brokerage. According to Christensen, small businesses almost never win if they just rehash a competitor's work. But they have a 40% chance of success if they introduce a disruptive technology. Christensen's book, published in 1997, is already a bible among Silicon Valley startups. If you don't have a copy, the guide to disruption is now in paperback.

Does this qualify as disruptive? It's notoriously hard for independent record stores to beat back all their powerful competitors: category-killing retailers such as Tower Records, online music companies such as CDNow.com, and piracy-prone digital formats such as MP3.

But Steve Wood of Portland, Ore., thinks he can rewire his old hi-fi business into a viable click-and-mortar operation. Two years ago, he bought and dot-commed Django's, a small chain of music stores in Portland known locally for 29 years for its expert staff and vast collection of obscure vinyl and videos. Since then, Wood has been on a venture capital-backed buying spree, acquiring similar small chains around the country.

By year's end, Wood hopes to have 30 stores in seven states. Rather than simply rolling them up, Wood is actively preserving each store's neighborhood niche by keeping the staff and letting managers (think John Cusack in High Fidelity) retain some marketing independence. "Their local culture is what makes them cool," says Wood, "so we're leaving them alone." Well, not entirely. In the middle of each store now sits an Internet kiosk that allows shoppers to browse and buy from any store in Wood's ever-expanding chain. Great. Now if we could only remember how to work a turntable.