Chile's real-time e-invoices became a bankable record small firms could borrow against
Mandatory e-invoicing let the tax authority see every sale, then let lenders trust the invoice and fund SMEs.
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2,000 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDPiracanjuba turned 300 million milk cartons into AI-updated missing-person posters
With Ampfy and Mães da Sé, Brazil’s Piracanjuba used AI to age-progress missing people’s photos and printed them on milk cartons sold near where they vanished.
Read the case37signals rejected puzzle-based programmer hiring and tried candidates out for size
37signals refused to hire programmers on puzzles and tricks, preferring to try candidates out for size; the post drew 648 points and 442 comments on Hacker News
Read the caseBialetti's 1933 moka pot put the espresso bar's physics in every kitchen
Inspired by a laundry boiler, Bialetti's 1933 moka brews espresso by steam pressure alone — sitting in ~90% of Italian homes, 300 million made
Read the caseLighthouse Reports exposed First Wap using leaked tracking data and a fake-buyer sting
A leaked archive of 1.5M phone-tracking operations plus an undercover buyer sting let 70+ journalists prove First Wap sold spy tools to anyone, on camera.
Read the caseGeiger's random forest flags twice as many at-risk customers as gut feel
A German promo-products distributor scores every account's churn risk monthly in Power BI, doubling hit rate versus unsupported selection.
Read the caseTamil Nadu pooled all public drug buying into TNMSC and cut prices about 30%
One Indian state moved all public drug buying into a single company with two-envelope tenders, batch testing and 15-day payment — and cut prices about 30%.
Read the caseOne RSS tag, <enclosure>, pointed feeds at media files and made podcasting standard
Dave Winer added an enclosure element to RSS 2.0 carrying a media file's URL, length and type; players followed, and podcasting needed no new protocol.
Read the caseMG Egypt turned non-owners into its best salespeople and won Effie MENA Gold
With cars out of reach, MG's comedy showed Egyptians know its specs by heart anyway — fame without ownership won Effie MENA Gold.
Read the caseKenya's last-mile grid plan mined 35,000 existing transformers
Instead of building new plants and lines, Kenya Power connected homes within 600 metres of transformers, pushing national electricity access from 53% past 70%.
Read the casePayNearby turned India's kirana shops into bank branches
PayNearby turns corner stores into Aadhaar-enabled bank counters — withdrawals, transfers, bill pay and insurance where people already shop.
Read the caseFDA's rigid Nutrition Facts box ended creative serving sizes and made foods comparable
Instead of just asking for nutrition data, the FDA dictated one rigid box and set the serving sizes itself, so no brand could design its way out of comparison.
Read the caseTesco Malaysia's Unforgettable Bag paid 20 sen per reuse and took four Kancil silvers
Reusable bags fail in the car, not the checkout: Tesco printed endangered sea creatures on the bag and paid 20 sen each time its barcode hit the till.
Read the caseCanva let candidates use AI and raised the interview's realism
Canva replaced AI-solvable algorithm puzzles with ambiguous product problems and evaluated how candidates direct, debug, and own AI-generated code.
Read the caseIndia replaced state-border truck checks with one national electronic way bill
Under GST, India swapped physical checks at state borders for a portal-generated e-way bill. Over 13 crore consignments a month now move on it.
Read the caseMax Planck linguists settled the Indo-European origin debate with a 161-language tree
A balanced 161-language dataset with 52 ancient tongues let one ancestry tree date Indo-European to 8,100 years and merge the rival origin theories
Read the caseSamsung turned cart abandoners into buyers by re-issuing old prices
After a weak Black Friday, Samsung emailed 735,000 cart abandoners the two-year-old price of their items, making R$3.5m in a week at 5145% ROI.
Read the caseMarugame Seimen put a noodle factory in every store, then grew by exporting the format
An udon chain kneading from flour in all 800+ stores built Japan's freshest fast food; with home saturated, its top-grossing store is now in Waikiki.
Read the caseGirls Who Code taught code by having girls build the game characters games lack
A web experience by Mojo Supermarket and MakeMePulse lets girls code their own avatars in four languages; the character library is licensable to game companies.
Read the caseTime sold 2Gbps broadband as life's shortcuts, not speed numbers
Time Internet made 2Gbps tangible by selling shortcuts, not speed — a spoof spokesperson and hyper-contextual billboards won Kancil's effectiveness award.
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