Ingenious ideas that solved difficult problems. Explore what made them work.
The full archive, in the appWalmart put Symbotic's AI-driven robotics in all 42 regional distribution centers, letting software place each case anywhere and robots retrieve it on demand.
Read the caseVattenfall used mixed-integer programming to place turbines and route cables in offshore wind farms, adding about €10M of NPV per farm and €150M total.
Read the caseTo teach Russians a board game they did not know, Leo Burnett Moscow opened a real hotel where guests paid for everything with trivia answers.
Read the caseWith IIT Bombay, Tata Steel built an optimizer for continuous annealing that raised premium-product quality 20% and cut fuel and CO2 by 8% per tonne.
Read the caseTU/e and MSD Animal Health built optimization models for biomanufacturing, lifting batch yield up to 50% and adding €50M a year in revenue.
Read the caseInstead of bribing users with freebies, KFC and Ogilvy Australia built a secret menu of staff inventions and hid it, so discovery drove downloads.
Read the caseThe Royal Australian Mint minted a $1 coin designed to be donated, so the touchable currency itself became the charity ask.
Read the caseConsolidation Coal mixed coal with water and pumped it through a 108-mile Ohio pipeline, delivering about 7 million tons before railroads undercut it.
Read the caseP&G's Ariel turned the unequal burden of laundry into a social campaign, and men pledging to 'share the load' nearly doubled the brand's sales.
Read the caseThe 1995 halibut IFQ program replaced a few-day derby with a months-long season, curbing overcapacity and raising value.
Read the caseThe free, already-deployed internet suite SMTP/POP3/IMAP beat the government-mandated X.400 system once commercial traffic was allowed on the net in 1995.
Read the caseMIME added a content-type header, an encoding rule and multipart boundaries to the RFC mail format, so one message could carry text, a photo or a file.
Read the caseKitKat stopped sponsoring gaming and started sponsoring breaking, putting a QR code on streamers' chairs that rewards viewers for a break.
Read the caseBy concentrating juice under vacuum and freezing it, Minute Maid removed the water that made oranges costly to move, then reconstituted it at home.
Read the caseAfter Bear Stearns, the Federal Reserve opened the discount window to primary dealers and took broad collateral, halting securities fire sales.
Read the caseThe FDIC backstopped banks' new senior debt and made participation the default, so no bank was singled out and the funding run stopped.
Read the caseThe FCC reverse-auctioned rural broadband subsidies, letting the market find the lowest price to stretch a $1.98bn fund across 713,000 locations.
Read the caseeos reframed shaving as skincare rather than hair removal, and doubled penetration while better-funded rivals reused the old template.
Read the casePhil Katz's LZ77+Huffman scheme was released as an open RFC, so ZIP, gzip, zlib and PNG used it freely, while the patented LZW in GIF was enforced.
Read the caseKidd and West found that lowering oxygen and raising CO2 slows an apple's breathing, so it keeps for months without being frozen.
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