Humanitaria folded cardboard into an $18 relief bed that factories can make 24,000 a day
A Madrid startup made a humanitarian bed from layered cardboard in packaging factories, cutting cost by up to 90% versus camp beds.
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300 RECENT CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDHootsuite named a 'Czar of Bad Systems' to scrap rules like the $200 T-shirt approval
Hootsuite's CEO gave one employee authority to fix broken internal processes anywhere in the company, starting with swag approvals.
Read the caseHellon and Yara paid French farmers for greener rapeseed through a biofuel buyer
Objectif CoolZa linked Yara's green fertilizer, a carbon calculator and a biofuel buyer, so 25 farmers cut CO2 by 15% and earned 4.7% more.
Read the caseGeorgia Tech burns feces underwater to turn the toilet into a plug-in appliance
A Gates-funded Georgia Tech toilet heats and pressurizes waste into a supercritical fluid that combusts underwater, so it needs no sewer.
Read the caseGreat River Energy hung bowling-ball sensors on its lines and gained up to 42.8% capacity
Heimdall Power's sensors read a line's real temperature, so operators can safely push more power through existing wires.
Read the caseGrantham Hospital's £15,000 toy 'Kitten Scanner' says it saved £150,000 in child sedation
A miniature MRI lets children scan toys first, so the Lincolnshire hospital says fewer need sedation for real scans.
Read the caseGilead chained FDA, EMA and WHO reviews so Zambia could approve lenacapavir in 12 days
Gilead sequenced regulators so each reused the last one's work, letting a 150-person agency approve an HIV drug in 12 working days.
Read the casePharmaSwap ran a secret pilot, then routed drug swaps as prescriptions to get past EU law
Dutch pharmacists and FLOOW2 built a marketplace for expiring drugs, proved the waste in a secret pilot, then went legal by swapping prescriptions.
Read the caseFishtek and the RSPB float a spinning 'eye' buoy to scare seabirds away from gillnets
A Looming Eye Buoy with an animated eye effect cut seabird bycatch risk by 59% in a Cornish fishing trial, while a bird-of-prey kite cut it by 71%.
Read the caseFacing Homelessness puts tiny homes in Seattle backyards and keeps ownership itself
Seattle homeowners lend backyard space for free, and the nonprofit keeps ownership of the tiny house so the homeowner's property tax doesn't rise.
Read the caseFacebook gave each college its own database, and avoided Friendster's slowdowns
Launching school by school, Zuckerberg kept a separate database per college, an accident that became Facebook's sharding model.
Read the caseEat School Rent lets restaurants use idle school kitchens at night to raise school funds
Eat School Rent pairs schools with food businesses that need affordable kitchen space in evenings and weekends, and the rent goes to the school.
Read the caseDP World Southampton charged £10 per container to fund £70 rebates for short rail hauls
DP World Southampton taxed every laden container £10 to subsidize rail trips under 140 miles, cutting 64,300 lorry journeys in a year.
Read the caseCloudflare, Apple and Fastly split DNS knowledge with a proxy so no one sees who asked
Oblivious DNS puts a proxy between user and resolver, so the proxy sees the user but not the query and the resolver sees the query but not the user.
Read the caseCengage Unlimited sold its whole textbook catalog for $179.99 a year, and 2.6M subscribed
Cengage let students pay one yearly fee for all 22,000 titles, so cost no longer scaled with each book bought; 2.6M subscribers by March 2020.
Read the caseCava used Raspberry Pi sensors to redesign menu boards, seating and grilling
Cava's data chief used cheap sensors to see where lines bunched and who lingered, then reworked menu boards, seating and grill order.
Read the caseBYU and Cornell found paying kids a nickel to eat vegetables beat forcing them onto trays
Small rewards, from a nickel to a raffle ticket, raised school fruit and vegetable eating by 80% and cut waste by a third, for a week.
Read the caseBrok's developer unmasked scam Steam curators by sending them Prologue keys, not full ones
Fabrice Breton answered free-key requests with keys to the free Prologue; curators who never noticed were not playing, and Valve removed pages.
Read the caseBlackpool used satellite images and AI to fix 5,145 potholes for £450,000, not £1.5m
Blackpool says it was the first council to use AI on satellite images to colour-code road damage, catching potholes before repairs grow costly.
Read the caseBiome Renewables bolted owl-feather fringes onto turbine blades to cut low-frequency noise
Biome's FeatherEdge, modeled on owl-feather fringe, cut turbine noise 3.4 dB beyond standard serrations in early tests.
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