James Ledbetter of Inc. Magazine speaks at Entrecon Thursday morning.

When Jim Ledbetter and his staff at Inc. magazine sat down last year to review candidates for its 2014 Company of the Year, one thing stood out.

Almost all were involved in some kind of disruption, he said. And these disruptions were creating entirely new markets and new consumers, and changing the way business is done.

“We are living in an era of disruption,” said Ledbetter, who gave the keynote address on the first day of EntreCon, a two-day conference sponsored by the University of West Florida Center for Entrepreneurship and the Studer Community Institute.

Some of the major disrupters of this era include Napster, Uber, Charles Schwab, Amazon, Twitter and TripAdvisor.

These are just a few of the companies that are accelerating the pace of change in business, said Ledbetter, who is the editor of Inc. magazine and Inc.com. He also is the author of five books and the former deputy managing editor of CNN Money and a senior editor at TIME.

“What has happened over the course of a decade, maybe two, is that companies have figured out how to put the crowd in charge … how to make a crowd the leader of a business,” said Ledbetter. “Not simply reaching consumers, but empowering consumers.”

Inc.’s company of the year, Airbnb, is a terrific example, he said. The magazine described Airbnb as disruptive, brazen, brilliant and possibly illegal. Yet the home-sharing empire has become the largest lodging provider on earth. It has more lodging than Hilton Worldwide, InterContinental Hotel Group or any other hotel chain in the world.

Three guys in their 30s came up with the idea of renting rooms in other people’s homes, of convincing people to hand over the keys of their house to some guy who found them through the Internet. It sounds a little strange, but in 2014, that’s exactly what 10 million people did.

“Here’s a company with 800,000 listings on its website and it owns nothing,” said Ledbetter. “It doesn’t own a single hotel building.”

The people who are using the service are also the people who are providing the rooms. It’s making the consumer part of the transaction, not just an end-user of the product, said Ledbetter.

“That is the signature business development of our business era,” he said.

The disruption that companies like Uber, Airbnb and Twitter are creating, for the most part, are happening among large players. From a small biz perspective, however, Ledbetter says there are still lessons that can be derived from looking at disruption.

“The critical one is how are you going to make use of the crowd,” he said. “What can you do with your customers to put them as much in charge as possible ...Turning your customers, your users, into brand champions is a great thing that even the smallest businesses, like the local ice cream shop, can do if they do it smartly.”

But the most fundamental thing for all small businesses has not changed over the years.

“What is the problem you’re trying to solve?” he said. “How are you solving it? What can you do to make the customer’s life easier? That’s the core of any great business idea.”