Louisville rerouted stormwater to idle pipes, saving $200M
Louisville MSD and Tetra Tech used real-time control to reroute stormwater to idle pipe capacity, saving $200M in construction.
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3,236 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDUCRT secured Maasai land with communal titles
Edward Loure's UCRT secured Maasai land with communal CCRO titles, avoiding fragmentation.
Read the caseDanish dairies pooled into one brand to defend their reputation
Danish dairy cooperatives pooled into one legally registered, quality-policed export brand to fight counterfeiters.
Read the caseVodafone and Safaricom built M-Pesa from users' airtime workaround
Vodafone and Safaricom, seeing pilot users turn airtime into currency, rebuilt their microloan tool into M-Pesa, a direct cash transfer system.
Read the caseMacCready won flight prize with a crashable plane
Paul MacCready won the human-powered flight prize by building a flimsy plane that was cheap to crash and fast to rebuild, enabling hundreds of test flights.
Read the caseMaghribi traders deterred cheating agents with collective boycott
Maghribi traders deterred cheating agents by collectively boycotting anyone accused, making silence complicity.
Read the caseMalian cotton farmers cut insurance false negatives using buyer's data
Malian cotton farmers got a village-level insurance trigger using yield data the cotton buyer already recorded, cutting false negatives from 45% to 7%.
Read the caseGenoa paid its war debt by handing creditors the island they conquered
In 1346, cash-poor Genoa paid its fleet's financiers by granting them rights to govern and tax Chios, which they ran profitably for two centuries.
Read the caseMaxwell House became the Haggadah at Passover
Maxwell House gave away a free Haggadah with every can of coffee, embedding the brand in the Passover Seder ritual.
Read the caseMaxwell and Thomson defined the ohm as a repeatable experiment
Maxwell and Thomson defined the ohm as a repeatable spinning-coil experiment, so any lab could derive it without a master artifact.
Read the caseMcDonald's stopped collecting royalties and started owning the land
McDonald's, cash-poor from thin royalties, had Sonneborn buy land under each franchise and sublease it back at a markup, gaining steady rent and eviction power.
Read the caseMCI turned a two-city private line permit into long-distance by adding a dial tone
MCI turned a two-city private line permit into a long-distance service by adding a dial tone, forcing courts to rule on the text.
Read the caseMedieval English landowners use courts to transfer risk
A Crusader can't legally protect land he leaves behind, so English courts invent a second kind of ownership to fix it
Read the caseMergenthaler cast fresh type to skip distribution
Ottmar Mergenthaler's Linotype cast fresh type lines from reusable matrices, eliminating manual distribution and outpacing composition-only machines.
Read the caseResearchers boosted flu shots by asking employees to write down a time
Researchers added a line asking employees to write when they'd get a flu shot, lifting vaccination rates by 4 points.
Read the caseCongress made contractors buy payment bonds for subcontractors
Congress replaced the flawed Heard Act with the Miller Act, requiring contractors to post payment bonds so subs could claim against a surety.
Read the caseMoench built tufting machine from scratch, not modified sewing machine
Ernest Moench built a tufting machine from scratch, avoiding sewing machine limits, and his 1928 patent was cited for decades.
Read the caseMuscovy Company turned a failed expedition into a Russia trade monopoly
When the Muscovy Company's Arctic search failed, it redirected pooled capital to the Russia trade it found, becoming a permanent joint-stock firm.
Read the casemyAgro sold farm seed the way vendors sold phone credit
myAgro sold seed via scratch cards, letting farmers save small amounts through vendors they already trusted.
Read the casePolitical speech was banned, so he stopped a $3.6 billion dam using photography galleries
Censorship policed a category — dissent. Art exhibits sat just outside it, and could still carry the exact thing dissent would have said: the cost of the dam.
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