WWF's Your Plastic Diet priced plastic pollution at a credit card a week
WWF commissioned its own microplastics meta-study, then sold the finding as one everyday object: about five grams of plastic ingested weekly — a credit card.
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1,000 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDWebhooks flipped the API: instead of asking, apps get called when things happen
Jeff Lindsay's 2007 'webhooks' are user-defined HTTP callbacks: apps push events instead of polling, and every SaaS integration now speaks them.
Read the caseWalmart ordered all its suppliers onto one internet EDI protocol, and retail followed
In 2002 Walmart told every supplier to trade documents over the open AS2 internet protocol, collapsing the fees of the private networks EDI ran on.
Read the caseIndia rolled every state's vehicle register into one VAHAN database of 250 million records
NIC gave all states one free software stack for registration and licences; their registers rolled up into a National Register of 250 million vehicle records.
Read the caseSoquimich's fertilizer-recommendation system turned agronomy advice into sales
Chilean fertilizer maker Soquimich paired an expert system with mixed-integer programming to recommend blends; the simplified second version raised sales.
Read the caseSolvatten made sunlight purify drinking water in a folding 10-litre jerrycan
A Swedish microbiologist folded a treatment plant into a jerrycan: fill it, lay it in the sun for four hours, and a red-green face says when the water is safe.
Read the caseTwo states reunified a broken railway under one concession; SITARAIL doubled freight
Two governments gave the 1,260 km Abidjan-Ouagadougou line to one private operator with free tariffs; freight jumped from 230 to 428 million tkm in a year.
Read the caseSenegal's ORBUS single window cut trade pre-clearance from four days to half a day
One electronic form routed to banks, insurers, and agencies replaced the office crawl; customs revenue rose from $625M in 2005 to over $1 billion in 2008.
Read the caseSamsung's The Mind Guardian hid an Alzheimer's screening test inside a video game
Samsung and Cheil Spain turned cognitive screening into a video game: 45 minutes of play yields an AI memory report at 97% claimed accuracy, free on tablets.
Read the casePathé let SilverScreener's math decide which movies keep their screens
A forecast-plus-optimization system for weekly keep-or-replace movie decisions ran in a Pathé theater and out-earned two comparable unaided cinemas.
Read the casePanasonic's Airdibles filmed 'recipe videos' cooked from dust, mould and pet fur
Panasonic made recipe videos where the ingredients were indoor air pollutants — nasi lemak out of dust and mould — to sell air-purifying air conditioners.
Read the casePakistan built PaCCS after customs outsourcing failed; 87% clear within an hour
Swiss outsourced inspection raised costs and added no revenue; three officers rebuilt the process: 26 steps and 62 verifications became one declaration.
Read the caseIndia's ULIP turned seven ministries' logistics data into one API layer
ULIP pooled FASTag toll reads, rail cargo tracking, customs and port systems behind one government-run API portal; 400 firms registered within six months.
Read the caseMorris Canal climbed 1,674 feet on water-powered inclined planes, not 300 locks
Facing 1,674 feet of elevation, the Morris Canal rode boats over the hills on 23 water-powered cradle-car ramps — hauling Pennsylvania coal to New York.
Read the caseMarch of Dimes ran Salk's vaccine through a 1.8-million-child field trial
The March of Dimes funded a two-year trial of Salk's polio vaccine in 1.8 million children, judged by an independent center — it came back safe and effective.
Read the caseMalaysia beat a currency attack by invalidating offshore ringgit, then taxed exits by time
September 1998: peg the ringgit, cut rates, invalidate foreign ringgit so shorts had to buy back — then refine the one-year freeze into a graduated exit levy.
Read the caseISDA's master agreement made every swap one contract and every default one number
Sign one master contract, confirm each trade on one page: ISDA's architecture nets a default across thousands of swaps to a single payment.
Read the caseICIPE repelled and trapped maize stemborers with companion plants, not chemicals
ICIPE turned the maize field into an ecosystem: a legume pushes stemborer moths away, a border grass traps and kills them, and a parasitic weed dies off.
Read the caseGuatemala auctioned spectrum on demand and let buyers pick the use — prices halved
The 1996 law let anyone demand an unused band, auctioned it as a tradable title, and let the winner pick the service — mobile prices halved versus the region.
Read the caseGenBank won biology's data by getting journals to refuse papers without its ID
GenBank became biology's universal sequence archive by making its accession number a condition of publication, so every paper had to feed the bank first.
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