Clarke and Wright's savings trick made delivery routes computable by hand
A 1964 algorithm merged the most worthwhile route pairs first — and gave fleets routes they could compute.
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2,000 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDIBM pointed 13,000 salespeople with two models instead of territory folklore
IBM's OnTARGET found hidden sales opportunities and its Market Alignment Program reallocated reps to them — worth hundreds of millions a year.
Read the caseMaersk's Daily Maersk guaranteed on-time ocean delivery with cash compensation
In October 2011 Maersk Line guaranteed Asia–Europe transit times, paying USD 100–300 per late container where 44% of boxes ran late.
Read the caseIndia's ABDM linked health records with consent, not a central database
India built rails for a billion health records without building a warehouse: hospitals keep the files, a consent switch hands them to any doctor or app.
Read the caseVaseline co-created the first lotion for transgender women and won two Spikes Grands Prix
Asked for a campaign, Ogilvy answered with a product: a clinically proven body lotion co-created with transgender women, sold out in Thailand.
Read the caseISO 6346 gave every shipping container one self-checking identity number
Eleven characters — owner, serial, check digit — tell any crane or customs officer which box it holds and whether the number was misread.
Read the caseEquity Bank turned insolvency into Kenya's largest bank by market value
After insolvency, Equity rebuilt around the unbanked: new controls, savings and microloans, a 2004 bank license and a 2006 IPO as the biggest bank by value.
Read the caseBayh-Dole let universities patent federally funded inventions
Bayh-Dole flipped ownership of government-funded inventions to universities; licensing has helped spawn over 17,000 U.S. startups.
Read the caseMastercard rig let a wheelchair user be an Australian Open ballkid
Instead of buying ads at the Australian Open, sponsor Mastercard built a ball rig that let an 11-year-old wheelchair champion work as a ballkid.
Read the caseBT scheduled field engineers dynamically and saved $150M a year
BT added heuristic search and constraint reasoning to Work Manager so thousands of field jobs could be reassigned as reality changed.
Read the caseIndia's e-RUPI voucher could only be spent on one thing at a time
A prepaid QR/SMS voucher, redeemable only for one named service, made welfare payments leak-proof.
Read the caseNRK exposed phone-location sellers by requesting its own data, then buying it
A Norwegian broadcaster used GDPR requests to trace how apps sold a journalist's location, then bought 'anonymized' data and found a real person in it
Read the caseAmbev's Zé Delivery out-delivered the delivery apps with its own beer channel
The brewer skipped third-party apps: its own Zé Delivery brings beer in under an hour from 850 cities' stock.
Read the caseNIO split the battery from the car, rented it monthly, and made swapping licensable
NIO's 2020 BaaS sells the car without the battery, rents packs monthly via a battery asset company, and runs a 2,400-station swap network.
Read the caseEsri gave the shapefile spec away and it became GIS's universal exchange format
Esri published the shapefile's full byte-level spec for free, and rivals had no choice but to make it GIS's universal interchange format.
Read the caseSleepZone priced its anti-snore pillows by snore volume and won a Dubai Lynx Gold
SleepZone's In-Snore Coupons turned a partner's snoring into a discount; foot traffic rose 34% and pillow sales 22%.
Read the caseBangladesh's member-owned rural power cooperatives kept losses and theft low
Bangladesh electrified villages through ~70 consumer-owned power cooperatives; collections hit 97% and a World Bank project cut losses from 13% to 10.5%.
Read the caseADB lent Karachi's newly privatized KESC $150M for a turnaround; losses halved to 15%
After KESC's 2005 privatization, ADB lent $150M against a turnaround plan; T&D losses fell from 34.2% to 15.3% and the utility turned profitable.
Read the caseHatch-Waxman traded patent length for a fast generic pathway.
The 1984 law let generics piggyback on a brand's approval and challenge patents, while extending the brand's patent life, kick-starting generic competition.
Read the caseFive Star Chicken proved its name with a salesman who can't sell anything else
Thailand's obsession with ratings left nobody with a perfect five, so Five Star Chicken made a salesman fail at mundane five-star sales — and won a Grand Prix.
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