McDonald's Philippines made its restaurants overnight study halls for students
Party rooms idle at night became free study spaces with WiFi, laptops and charging—73,000+ students signed up nationwide.
Read the casegenius.wikiA CASESTUDIES.CHAT ARCHIVE
Good problems.
Brilliant solutions.
Ingenious ideas that solved difficult problems. Explore what made them work.
The full archive, in the appPublished cases
2,000 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDPhilips released free 3D-print files so customers can repair its own shavers.
Philips Fixables offers open 3D-printable files for its own accessories, turning consumers into repairers and shrinking e-waste.
Read the caseAlphaFold predicted a protein's shape from its sequence instead of measuring it
DeepMind's AlphaFold solved the 50-year protein-folding problem by predicting 3D structure from sequence at near-atomic accuracy.
Read the caseSuguna's contract farming turned 200 birds into a 40,000-farm poultry network
Suguna supplied chicks, feed and vet care, then guaranteed a buyback price — farmers scaled output, Suguna carried market risk, and 40,000 farms joined.
Read the caseGoogle Stadia's self-play ML agents exposed and fixed a card game's imbalance in days
CNN agents bootstrapped by self-play ran a million Chimera matches, exposed a 60/40 deck gap and an overpowered card, and rebalanced in days
Read the caseGoogle mocked Apple with a fake 'iPager' launch — two months later Apple adopted RCS
To shame Apple into fixing green-bubble texting, Google parodied an iPhone keynote for a 90s pager; weeks later Apple announced it would adopt RCS.
Read the caseC.H. Robinson beat its old routing tech on 10 benchmarks with one framework
C.H. Robinson built a set-partitioning routing framework that outperformed its third-party tools on 10 benchmark instances and cut setup time per customer.
Read the caseIndia's 108 service bought emergency ambulances by the trip, not the fleet
States pay a private operator per trip under one call centre; poor and remote callers use it most and 89–98% of obstetric emergencies reach hospital in time.
Read the caseHSBC One won young customers by selling tickets to esports star T1
Opening an HSBC One account entered millennials in a meet-and-greet with League of Legends team T1 — new young customers rose ~150%.
Read the caseTransMedics' OCS keeps donor hearts beating in transit and revives 'unusable' organs
Instead of packing a donor heart on ice, the OCS perfuses it warm and beating in transit; 81% of OCS hearts other centers had rejected were transplanted.
Read the caseScoville made chili heat a dilution ratio any lab could reproduce
Wilbur Scoville had no instrument for pepper heat, so he measured how far the extract must be diluted before tasters stop feeling it — and the ratio stuck.
Read the caseCook's crew sealed a sinking ship's hole by fothering a sail
Cook's crew sealed a sinking ship's hole by fothering a sail under the hull, letting water pressure hold it shut.
Read the caseAmerican Hospital Supply put the order desk inside the hospital
ASAP moved hospital supply ordering from phone calls and paper to terminals, making replenishment a data link instead of a sales chore.
Read the caseNursery Crimes turned Malaysia's lullabies into warnings about child sexual abuse
Protect & Save The Children and Naga DDB twisted trusted nursery rhymes into films showing that abusers are usually people a child knows and trusts.
Read the caseLufthansa Technik and BASF wrapped a 777 in shark skin and cut its fuel burn ~1%
Airliners are polished smooth. BASF and Lufthansa Technik put microscopic riblets on the fuselage instead, the way shark denticles cut skin friction.
Read the caseShenzhen's 1987 land auction: sell the right to use, not the land itself
The state kept land ownership and auctioned 50-year usage rights; Shenzhen raised 5.25 million yuan in 17 minutes, and a constitutional amendment followed.
Read the caseGodrej turned Naga sadhus into living eye charts at the Kumbh Mela
Eye charts painted on ascetics' backs make pilgrims test their own sight; 400,000 people received eye care at Maha Kumbh 2025.
Read the caseTomTom turned every GPS car into a traffic sensor, ending the need for road detectors
Floating car data let TomTom map traffic from drivers themselves—no new roadside hardware anywhere.
Read the caseOstrom showed villages govern commons better than states or markets
The tragedy of the commons said only privatization or state control could save shared resources; decades of fieldwork found a third way — rules by the users.
Read the caseLambda School took a cut of graduates' salaries instead of upfront tuition
Lambda School let students enroll free and took 17% of salary only after they landed a $50k job, aligning its revenue with graduate success.
Read the case