NRMA built a working car out of the parts its rivals did not insure.
NRMA assembled a roadworthy car from 30,000 parts its competitors left off their policies, making an abstract coverage gap physically undeniable.
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3,236 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDIBM modeled its whole extended supply chain, saving $750M in 1998.
IBM built AMT, a tool that models the whole extended supply chain with optimisation and simulation, then cut $750M in costs in 1998.
Read the caseEarSwitch's oximeter reads oxygen in the ear to remove skin-tone bias.
EarSwitch's Airquity campaign shows finger pulse oximeters misread darker skin and offers an inner-ear oximeter that does not.
Read the caseSafaricom grew M-Pesa's agent network in lock-step with its customers.
M-Pesa kept agents and users in balance so every outlet was busy and no user was far from one, making mobile money usable.
Read the caseAlternating current won the power war because transformers let electricity travel.
Tesla's polyphase AC could be stepped up by a transformer to cross distances, so power outgrew Edison's DC and AC became the standard.
Read the caseQWERTY won by being first and trained, not by being the best keyboard.
Sholes's layout shipped on the first successful typewriter and got baked into a generation of typists, so the world kept it even when better layouts appeared.
Read the caseRISC-V won chip design by making the instruction set free to use.
Berkeley released RISC-V as a free, open instruction set, so any company could build a chip without licensing fees, and a wide ecosystem grew around it.
Read the casePfizer's dry-ice box carried a -70C vaccine to a normal hospital.
A suitcase-sized reusable thermal shipper kept the vaccine frosty for days on ordinary planes and trucks.
Read the caseMontgomery County downzoned farmland but gave landowners development rights to sell.
Montgomery County downzoned 93,000 acres but granted tradeable development rights, so conservation pays farmers and growth is steered.
Read the caseColumbia's 33⅓ microgroove LP won by fitting a symphony on one disc.
A narrower groove and 33⅓ rpm let a 12-inch vinyl record hold twenty minutes a side, so the long-playing album replaced the 78.
Read the caseJD.com built its own couriers and delivery when China's were unreliable.
JD.com bought its own warehouses and drivers, scoring authenticity and fast delivery in a market of fakes.
Read the caseIBM's open PC architecture set the standard, and clones took it over.
IBM built its PC from off-the-shelf parts and let Microsoft keep the OS rights, so the machine became the industry standard that others could clone.
Read the caseDachser's swap body gave road boxes legs to hop onto rail.
A container with fold-out legs moved between truck and rail without a crane, spreading intermodal inland.
Read the caseKlemperer's product-mix auction lets the Bank of England lend against risky collateral.
The Bank of England's Indexed Long-Term Repo uses a product-mix auction that shifts funds between collateral types as stress changes; it raised welfare ~50%.
Read the caseASCII won by giving every machine one agreed 128-character code.
The American Standards Association set one 7-bit code so different machines could exchange data, and ASCII became early computing's common language.
Read the caseAmazon's $79 a year made shipping a subscription.
Amazon Prime charged a flat fee for unlimited two-day shipping, turning freight from a cost into a habit.
Read the caseAmazon rented its own warehouse network to third-party sellers.
Amazon opened its order-fulfilment network to outside sellers, turning a cost centre into a product.
Read the caseVinFast sold a car like a phone - e-commerce and livestreams - and took 27,649 pre-orders.
Vietnam's VinFast launched the tiny VF3 EV on Shopee and influencer livestreams at a price anyone could finance, notching 27,649 pre-orders in 66 hours.
Read the caseTesla released all its patents to grow the electric-car market, not to protect it.
Musk tore down Tesla's patent wall and pledged not to sue EV makers, betting shared tech would grow the EV market faster than exclusivity.
Read the caseStack Overflow paid in reputation and got the world's best programming library for free.
Reputation points and badges, unspendable but shown on every profile, motivated programmers to write millions of high-quality answers for free.
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