Chuck Hull made a 3D object by curing a tank of resin one layer at a time
Hull's stereolithography added material layer-by-layer instead of cutting it away, inventing 3D printing and founding 3D Systems.
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3,236 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDChileCompra made its purchase auctions competitive by standardizing the catalog
Chile's procurement agency normalized its product catalog and re-ran supplier auctions, cutting transaction prices 8% and saving about $74M in 2022.
Read the caseChile's forest firms put harvesting and trucks on the same model instead of intuition
Arauco and its peers ran truck dispatch, harvesting, machinery and road planning on optimization, saving millions a year.
Read the caseBlue Bell cut inventory 31% in 21 months without losing a sale
Blue Bell used management-science models, including a new marker system, to cut inventory from $371M to $256M in 21 months.
Read the caseSOS India turned a street kid's ad recreations into a donation engine
SOS Children's Villages India had a street kid recreate famous ads and offer them to brands in exchange for donations, raising corporate donations 61.5%.
Read the caseSamsung made Gen Z hunt for the ad instead of avoiding it
Samsung launched the Flip4 in Australia by seeding clues that made people engineer their own targeting, lifting Flip4 sales 32% week-on-week on $500k media.
Read the caseiFood broadcast the Women's World Cup inside its delivery app
iFood streamed 64 Women's World Cup matches inside its own app, turning the delivery platform into a media channel and boosting orders 23%.
Read the caseZiv and Lempel compressed data by pointing back to text already sent
LZ77 shrank data with 'go back N and copy L symbols' instead of a pre-agreed codebook, making compression universal.
Read the caseCuckoo hashing made lookup constant-time by evicting a key like a cuckoo egg
Pagh & Rodler gave each key two homes; on collision the newcomer evicts the resident, guaranteeing O(1) worst-case search.
Read the caseYaskawa let an RFID tag tell a robot how to build each inverter
Yaskawa's DrivE Center factory tagged each of 500 inverter types so robots and screens knew what to do, cutting work-in-progress to a third.
Read the caseVariFlight sold insurance against a takeoff time it predicts itself
VariFlight's data let an insurer underwrite a delay policy not on actual arrival but on the app's own predicted departure, accurate to ±5 min 95%.
Read the caseOtsuka's Lifeline Vender sells drinks by day, shelters stock by night
Otsuka's Lifeline Vender is a normal vending machine that, in a blackout, dispenses its contents free by hand — a self-rotating disaster stockpile.
Read the caseCacau Show franchised a shipping container to reach far-flung towns
Cacau Show's container store cut franchise entry to about R$65,000 and reached 1,000 shops in 3 years, powering Brazil's biggest chocolate chain.
Read the caseBaemin built its own delivery rails instead of renting a platform's
Baemin named its in-house logistics network 'B-Link', letting its food-delivery riders carry a grocery arm that turned EBITDA-positive by 2024.
Read the caseAisin used vibration to line up washers no one wanted to count
Aisin's no-power vibratory sorter aligned 250 washers onto a rod by 'dragonfly-spinning' them, replacing an hour of daily hand stacking.
Read the caseApple's HLS made streaming work over ordinary HTTP chunks, and it won
HLS splits video into small files and a playlist served by any web server, so it crosses firewalls and became the top streaming format.
Read the caseAustralia settled its electricity market every five minutes so speed got paid for
The NEM moved spot-price settlement from 30 to 5 minutes, so fast-response assets like batteries are paid for exactly when they respond.
Read the caseBoston cut 50 school buses, saving $5M a year, by solving routes and start times together
MIT and Boston Public Schools jointly optimized bus routes and school start times, saving $5M a year and cutting 50 buses.
Read the caseChipotle found strangers who ordered the exact same meal and introduced them by email
A loyalty email scanned millions of transactions to match two people who'd ordered the identical burrito at the same time in different cities.
Read the caseCadbury lent the world's biggest movie star to 200,000 small shops with AI, not ads
Ogilvy Mumbai used deepfake voice and face to put Shah Rukh Khan in personalized ads for thousands of tiny stores, sparking a festival of local celebrating.
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