Ajinomoto fought the MSG scare with a fake pizza conspiracy
Ajinomoto and Edelman fought the MSG scare by staging a satirical TikTok conspiracy to cancel pizza, making viewers defend the science themselves.
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3,236 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDAkamai answered internet traffic jams with an algorithm instead of bigger servers
Akamai solved flash crowds by replicating content across distributed servers and using consistent hashing to route each request to the nearest fast copy.
Read the caseAlaska gave villages quota to lease, not boats to build
Alaska's fishery council gave villages quota to lease to trawlers, funding jobs without boats.
Read the caseNew York City sold its rescue bonds to the teachers' pension fund it had fought
New York City, facing default with no bank buyer, got the teachers' pension fund to buy $150M in bonds by showing its members had more to lose.
Read the caseAldi cut its range to one item per category and won on price
The Albrecht brothers cut Aldi's range to one item per category, slashed overhead, and passed savings into price, beating full-assortment rivals.
Read the caseALDI quit the 'shop only with us' battle, asking only to be the cheap first trip instead
ALDI, stuck as a top-up stop, reframed its goal to being shoppers' first and cheapest trip, explicitly inviting them to shop elsewhere afterward.
Read the casePope funded his Iliad translation with reader subscriptions
Alexander Pope funded his Iliad translation by selling half-price subscriptions to future readers before writing a page.
Read the caseNobel funded his prizes with a will his family couldn't overturn
Alfred Nobel wrote a will that funded prizes via independent executors, so his family couldn't redirect the fortune.
Read the caseAll-America Selections built a blind trial network to test seed claims
All-America Selections, a nonprofit trial network, lets impartial judges grow new varieties against standards so the plant, not the seller, proves the claim.
Read the caseAmazon wrote press releases before code to build what customers wanted
Amazon made teams draft a product's press release before writing code, forcing customer value to be defined first.
Read the caseAmazon wired human judgment into its catalog cleanup
Amazon's catalog had duplicates no algorithm could catch, so engineers wired human judgment in as a callable function.
Read the caseSoy traders blacklisted Amazon farms cleared after a cutoff
ABIOVE's soy traders jointly refused to buy from Amazon farms cleared after a cutoff, verified by satellite, cutting deforestation-linked soy from 30% to 1%.
Read the caseAmerican Express backed a slip of paper with its own money
American Express backed a traveler's cheque with its own guarantee and a double-signature check, so any merchant could accept it on sight.
Read the caseAmerican Express scaled its rarest judgment call with software instead of headcount
American Express encoded veteran authorizers' judgment into software so junior staff could make expert calls immediately.
Read the caseAnNahar rebuilt Lebanon's history from its own front pages
AnNahar rebuilt Lebanon's missing history from 82 years of its own front pages and printed it as a newspaper edition.
Read the caseX Prize Foundation insured the $10 million prize it hadn't raised
The X Prize Foundation announced a $10M space prize it hadn't raised, so it bought a hole-in-one insurance policy to cover the payout.
Read the caseApple deleted the smartphone's keyboard and buttons and let software be the interface
Apple's iPhone removed the physical keyboard and stylus, letting the touchscreen adapt its controls to each app.
Read the caseAllies beat U-boats by protecting convoys, not ships
The Allies, unable to build escorts fast enough, grouped merchant ships into convoys so a single screen of escorts protected dozens of hulls at once.
Read the caseAtlantic Leather turned fish skins into premium leather
Atlantic Leather turned Iceland's discarded fish skins into premium leather by developing a tanning process that exploits their tear-resistant collagen weave.
Read the caseAustralian Steelers sold blank kit space with a QR code
The Australian Steelers, a sponsorless wheelchair rugby team, put a QR code in the logo slot, turning their bare kits into live ads and landing a sponsor.
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