  Within General Relativity, a minimally coupled scalar field governed by a
quadratic potential is able to produce an accelerated expansion of the universe
provided its value and excursion are larger than the Planck scale. This is an
archetypical example of the so called large field inflation models. We show
that by including higher curvature corrections to the gravitational action in
the form of the Geometric Inflation models, it is possible to obtain
accelerated expansion with a free scalar field whose values are well below the
Planck scale, thereby turning a traditional large field model into a small
field one. We provide the conditions the theory has to satisfy in order for
this mechanism to operate, and we present two explicit models illustrating it.
Finally, we present some open questions raised by this scenario in which
inflation takes place completely in a higher curvature dominated regime, such
as those concerning the study of perturbations.
