RoRo ships let vehicles drive on and off, instead of being craned into the hold.
Lifting every car or truck by crane was slow and damaging; drive-on/drive-off ships use a ramp so wheeled cargo rolls aboard in minutes.
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3,236 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDNVIDIA chained its own AI chips to cuOpt to stabilize an exploding supply network.
NVIDIA's demand-supply network outgrew its planning software, so it used its own HPC and cuOpt engine to keep the chain stable.
Read the caseMaersk's Triple-E made the big ship slower, cutting fuel and CO2 per box.
Bigger ships chased speed; Maersk slowed the Triple-E to 19 knots, adding long-stroke engines and waste-heat recovery to cut fuel 37% and CO2 per box 50%.
Read the caseIndia auctioned 3G spectrum for Rs 67,719 crore in 2010 across 22 service areas
India priced scarce 3G airwaves with an open auction across 22 service areas in 2010, raising Rs 67,719 crore
Read the caseIceland gave each boat a tradable share of the catch and ended the race to fish
In 1990 Iceland made the whole national catch a set of permanent tradable quotas, turning the commons into private ownership
Read the caseBuckaroo made low-cost custom footwear so children born with clubfoot could walk.
Instead of importing expensive orthotic shoes, Buckaroo trained 4,500 local cobblers to make made-to-measure clubfoot footwear and shipped 228,000 pairs.
Read the caseEthiopian flew cargo in the empty cabins of grounded jets when freight capacity vanished.
When passengers stopped flying, belly cargo space vanished; Ethiopian reconfigured 25 jets into freighters and moved 121,750 tons in cabin space.
Read the caseECT automated its container terminal, cutting a crane team from eight to three.
To keep Sea-Land, ECT built the world's first robotised terminal, with driverless AGVs and automated stacking cranes running the loop day and night.
Read the caseECCO's stochastic optimizer automated store replenishment for 536 shops in 27 countries.
ECCO replaced manual store ordering with a stochastic solver automating ~300,000 replenishment orders a month, saving millions a year.
Read the caseThe corrugated box replaced the wooden crate and made parcel shipping cheap.
Wooden crates were hand-built, heavy and expensive; a flat, light corrugated box that folds up cut the cost of shipping nearly anything.
Read the casePhilips made the cassette a world standard by giving it away for free in 1964.
A tape designed for office dictation was licensed royalty-free by Philips, so rival makers adopted it and it beat every proprietary rival.
Read the caseChewy replaced best-guess reordering with models that adjust to unreliable data.
Reordering 100k SKUs across 20 warehouses with messy data looked impossible; Chewy built models that self-correct, reducing split shipments and distances.
Read the caseBlu-ray won the disc war by storing more and shipping inside Sony's PlayStation 3.
Blu-ray's tighter grooves and blue-violet laser packed more HD data per disc, and Sony built a player into the PS3, so people adopted it without choosing it.
Read the caseAES became the world's cipher because NIST ran an open contest and the winner was free.
NIST chose the AES through a public international competition, and Rijndael won on security, speed and efficiency, with no royalties and no fanfare.
Read the caseBritain auctioned 15-year power contracts and offshore wind prices fell 67%.
CfD auctions let wind developers bid a 15-year strike price; competition drove offshore wind from £119.89 per MWh in 2015 to £39.65 in 2019.
Read the caseMotorola turned supplier negotiations into an optimised online award.
In a telecom downturn Motorola cut material cost by making sourcing an optimisation problem, negotiating $16 billion online and saving over $600 million.
Read the caseHamming let a machine find and fix its own flipped bits.
By overlapping parity checks so each bit is covered by several, Hamming codes locate a single error and correct it, instead of just detecting it and rerunning.
Read the caseThe FDIC shared future losses with bank buyers to stop fire-sale pricing.
When failed-bank assets scared buyers away, the FDIC absorbed most future losses on covered loans, keeping banks whole and cutting resolution costs.
Read the caseTCP fixed internet collapse by having senders back off before the network dies.
Jacobson's additive-increase, multiplicative-decrease rule made every sender brake together, ending the 1980s congestion collapses.
Read the caseBerkeley's RAID paper made cheap small disks outperform one big drive.
Patterson, Gibson and Katz showed arrays of PC disks with parity beat single mainframe drives on speed, cost and reliability.
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