A s firms are witnessing uncertain business conditions and more thrust is being given to agility, speed, and market responsiveness rather than scale and size, operating in a shoaling form is a desired strategy across many industries.Managers of established firms as well as those of emerging industry challengers continually seek new strategies that ensure better returns with minimal risk. While incumbent industry leaders struggle to sustain innovativeness and market responsiveness with firm size built to primarily secure cost advantages, emerging industry challengers search for innovations to break industry barriers. A 'shoaling strategy' (also referred to as disaggregation here), that will enable firms to operate in a synchronized manner like a school of fish to concurrently achieve scale economies as well as market responsiveness is proposed in this article. Shoaling strategy, on the one hand, reduces the opportunity cost of not exploiting emerging market opportunities and, on the other hand, reduces the investment risk that accrues due to large-scale integration.There is a traditional saying in business that 'big fish eats small fish,' which suggests that a firm's large scale will ensure higher returns and competitive advantage over rivals. A shoaling strategy, on the contrary, challenges this notion with the contention that 'quick fish -albeit smaller -can eat large fish.' The main premise of this argument is that a shoaling strategy (school of fish) to organize the value chain will be the most effective way to accomplish competitive advantage without large-scale investment commitment.'Small is beautiful,' argued Schumacher (1973) while proposing an aesthetic and humanistic approach for designing economic, business, and production systems. With a similar rationale, it is suggested that the small scale has emerged into an alternative paradigm for building efficient, innovative, and dynamic models of business. Recent studies attest to this phenomenon, indicating the emergence of knowledge-centered global enterprises operating as 'dispersed network[s] of smaller units' and large firms being disaggregated and their boundaries becoming shrunk and permeable (Birch, 1987;Contractor et al., 2010; 1 JEL classification codes: B20, D23, D24, L22, L23, M11, M21.Shoaling can be considered a unique business strategy, because it enables a large firm to operate with the nimbleness of a smaller firm or it can allow small firms to effectively rally their resources against large rivals.A shoaling strategy, on the one hand, reduces the opportunity cost of not exploiting emerging market opportunities and, on the other hand, reduces the investment risk that accrues due to large-scale integration.A shoaling form enables multipronged competitive strategies, permitting a firm to develop unique or optimal strategy for each rival it encounters in the respective market or region.