Carsome's rude newspaper love letters sold a pre-loved car as a CNY gift
Malaysia's top used-car platform ran Chinese New Year print ads that open as insults and close as love notes, making 'shiny and used' a gift of love.
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1,000 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDCanon bet on the all-electronic EF mount in 1987; it carried 100 million lenses
In March 1987 Canon abandoned its FD installed base for a mount with no mechanical linkages — every innovation then shipped inside the lens for thirty years.
Read the caseCampbell's underwrote Thanksgiving: insure the sides, claim a same-day replacement
Pandemic 2020: Campbell's sold free 'Dinner Insurance' in Manhattan — buy its sides on Instacart, and a failed dish got a replacement delivered.
Read the caseCambodia licensed village diesel operators instead of banning them; tariffs halved
Cambodia turned informal village power sellers into licensed distributors; when the grid arrived they bought bulk power and tariffs fell from $0.60 to $0.35.
Read the caseBYD built its own car-carrier fleet when the shipping queue couldn't keep up
BYD put its exports on ships named after its own cities — from a leased 7,000-car pioneer to the 9,200-CEU BYD Shenzhen, the largest car carrier afloat.
Read the caseBrazil put a dial on money entering, left the exit free — and made hot money pay
Facing a 30% currency surge, Brazil taxed inflows 2–6% while exits stayed free, then taxed the derivatives that routed around it — a throttle, not a wall.
Read the caseAustin Bradford Hill's nine viewpoints separated causal claims from lucky correlation
When no experiment could test smoking against lung cancer, Hill gave epidemiology nine questions that made causation auditable in public.
Read the caseBonds Unplugged: an acoustic album about periods that lifted undies sales 365%
For a teen period-undies launch, Bonds released a real acoustic album written by artists about their own periods — and lifted sales 365%.
Read the caseBOH turned tea sampling into a narrated space odyssey, one chapter per flavour
BOH's tasting box for herbal infusions read like a sci-fi serial: brew the chapter, scan the QR, and the flavour narrates its own scene.
Read the caseKarnataka's Bhoomi let 6.7 million farmers print their own land records
Instead of policing its clerks, Karnataka removed their discretion: a land record prints only from a kiosk at a fixed Rs 15, and the bribe market died.
Read the caseBharatNet lit the fibre India already owned to run one open pipe past 250,000 villages
The 2011 NOFN design spliced village councils onto spare PSU fibre as open-access wholesale infrastructure. The spine got built; the last mile still lags.
Read the caseBBC's Dracula 'Bloody Legend' billboard casts the Count's shadow only after sunset
A blank, stake-stabbed billboard sat mute all day; as the sun dropped, physics drew Dracula's fanged silhouette across it for free.
Read the caseDPLA's Banned Book Club used GPS to hand out free e-books where books were banned
DPLA turned book-ban lists into a stocking list: geo-targeted virtual libraries hand readers the exact titles pulled from their own local shelves.
Read the caseAtacadão: the Brazilian atacarejo format Carrefour took back to Paris
Brazil's Atacadão sells wholesale cheap to families too; ~400 stores, two-thirds of Carrefour Brasil, and a 2024 landing in Paris
Read the caseAssaí turned Brazil's dying hypermarkets into a 300-store cash-and-carry machine
The format that killed Brazil's hypermarkets then bought their shells: Assaí converted 66 Extra sites and hit 300 stores years ahead of plan.
Read the caseAmbikapur's Garbage Cafe lets anyone pay for a hot meal with plastic waste
A city-run cafe by the bus stand exchanges a kilo of plastic for a full meal — one sanitation budget line fighting litter and hunger at once.
Read the caseAmazon-Rivian EDV: a delivery van built from scratch, the largest EV order ever
Amazon skipped converted vans and co-designed a purpose-built EV with Rivian, road-testing 430,000 packages before its 100,000-unit rollout.
Read the casePrime Air's MK30 won BVLOS approval and folded drones into Amazon's same-day network
After layoffs and noise complaints, Amazon's quieter MK30 won FAA approval to fly beyond visual line of sight, launching from a same-day site.
Read the caseAirAsia filled Asean seats with unscripted Facebook Live adventures instead of fare cuts
Fare dumping was eroding AirAsia's brand, so it replaced landmark ads with interactive live travelogues that let viewers vote on what the hosts did next.
Read the caseThe 1939 Broadcasting House conference fixed concert pitch at A440 — by radio
The pitch war ended when the standard became a broadcast signal: 440 was the note a crystal oscillator could synthesize and every radio could carry.
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