Geely bought Volvo with two city governments' money, repaid in factories
Geely lacked the cash for Volvo, so Li Shufu took 4.9bn yuan from two city governments — and repaid them by building Volvo plants on their soil.
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2,000 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDMySQL charged for a commercial license but gave the same database away under GPL.
MySQL shipped one database under two licenses, free under GPL or paid commercial, so anyone could use it and the company could still be paid.
Read the caseKnorr replaced dating apps with friend-run cooking dates for Gen Z singles
Knorr turned friends' matchmaking posts into #ServingSingles — single friends cook, admirers shoot their shot in the comments, winners get a cooking date.
Read the caseHaldiram split into three regional family firms that shared one brand
In the 1990s the Agarwals split India into family-run zones under one Haldiram's brand; the branches later merged and sold 10% for ₹8,500 crore.
Read the caseRing's Search Party turns neighbourhood doorbell cameras into a lost-dog search grid
Amazon's Ring enrolled opted-in doorbell cameras across the US into an AI search party that reunites more than one lost dog a day with their owners.
Read the caseDavid Fifield's zip bomb made 10 MB expand to 281 TB without recursion
One kernel of compressed bytes, overlapped across 65,534 files, makes a 10 MB archive unzip to 281 TB in a single pass.
Read the caseSpies sold holidays to pet owners by giving the pets their own vacation
48% of Scandinavian pet owners skipped trips for their pets, so Spies built a pet-care service with remote fetch; 8,300 extra travelers and 627% ROMI.
Read the caseMcDonald's Indonesia turned slow home Wi-Fi into a bigger fries discount
McDonald's Indonesia embedded a speed test in its app, comparing home to store Wi-Fi and scaling a fries discount to the gap, luring slow-internet customers in.
Read the caseJames Somers's Hacker Classics mined "(1999)" titles to surface HN's best old posts
James Somers turned Hacker News's year-in-title repost convention into an automated list of its timeless classics
Read the caseNerolac turned paint shades into street-vendor shops — Abby Grand Prix 2025
At the Kumbh Mela, Nerolac's foldable paint shades became branded stalls for street vendors: 100 million reached, vendor sales up 300% in 45 days.
Read the caseTesla's 4680: laser-etched 'tabless' foils made a bigger cell run cooler, not hotter
Scaling a cell up should mean more resistance and heat; Tesla laser-cut the foil so the whole electrode edge becomes the tab, and the electron path got shorter.
Read the caseSBI's YONO turned a 22,000-branch bank into one app for 80 million customers
India's biggest bank folded banking, lending, insurance and shopping into one app, with branches and rural trust as its growth engine.
Read the caseMPEG LA pooled hundreds of video patents into one license.
Nine patent owners and the DOJ's blessing created a one-stop license for MPEG-2, so the standard could be used without a patent war.
Read the caseSpoor's AI bird radar turned wind farms' wildlife data into public evidence
Spoor turned the bird data buried in wind-farm reports into a public record, answering the anti-wind argument built on missing data.
Read the casePang Dong Lai pays staff double market wages and turns service into sales
70% above industry pay, 145 days off, profit shared 50/50 — turnover fell to 0.33% and 2025 revenue rose 39%.
Read the caseIRCTC turned the train PNR into a delivery address for station restaurants
Indian Railways catering arm let passengers order from station restaurants ahead, quoting PNR and berth — food meets the moving train.
Read the caseMIT's beer game made managers watch steady demand turn into a bullwhip
A four-role board game showed why supply chains oscillate — and made the lesson impossible to forget.
Read the caseCebu Pacific sold empty seats early and made flying cheaper than ferries
Cebu Pacific used permanent low fare buckets to smooth demand, fill weak flights and teach an island market to fly.
Read the caseNaTakallam hired refugees to teach online, bypassing Lebanon's work ban
NaTakallam hired refugees as online tutors and translators for clients abroad, sidestepping Lebanon's work permit ban.
Read the caseThe Document Foundation forked OpenOffice in 2010 and made the open suite unkillable
When Oracle froze OpenOffice.org, its developers forked the code to a neutral foundation — LibreOffice now outlives the brand it left behind.
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