Bell Labs' Blue Cell dropped the signal processor so a cell site ran on solar
Blue Cell skipped signal conversion and just shifted frequencies, cutting a cellular access point from 100W to 10W.
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300 RECENT CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDBalancing Act turned housing-site NIMBY fights into a budget game residents must hit
Balancing Act repurposed a budget simulator so residents pick housing sites against the state target and can submit a plan only if it meets it.
Read the caseAllonnia pulls PFAS from groundwater with air bubbles and skims off the foam
Allonnia's SAFF machine bubbles air through contaminated water so PFAS stick to the bubbles and can be skimmed off as concentrated foam.
Read the caseAlaska funded reinsurance from an insurance tax, then asked Washington for the savings
Alaska diverted $55M of insurance-tax revenue into reinsurance, cutting a 42% rate rise to 7% and saving Washington $56M in subsidies.
Read the caseAirtel runs a small AI model on engineers' phones, cutting Rs 30-45 crore of cloud cost
Airtel put a patented small language model on field engineers' ordinary phones to check install quality, replacing cloud inference that cost Rs 30-45 crore.
Read the caseAcumen's Optima interlocks business seats so cabins pack tighter, still lie-flat
Alternating forward-facing and angled seat pairs let passengers' feet slide under neighbours' side tables, fitting more seats per cabin.
Read the caseWaze and SpotHero put 500 Bluetooth beacons in Chicago's lower streets where GPS fails
A parking app bought the beacons and the city installed them, so navigation apps can locate drivers in multi-level tunnels.
Read the caseWarner Farm's corn maze earns a third of its income from 8 of 150 acres
A Massachusetts farm plants corn on a grid and cuts a pixelated picture into it with a GPS tractor, drawing 25,000 visitors a year.
Read the caseVitals' SmartShopper paid patients $25 to $500 to choose cheaper medical providers
Vitals' call centre found the cheaper lab or scanner and mailed patients a check, funded by insurers and employers' savings.
Read the caseDanny Meyer's USHG ended tipping with one all-in menu price (interview)
In an NPR interview, Meyer says 'hospitality included' pricing paid kitchen and dining room staff fairly, with a profit dip that recovered.
Read the caseToronto's Path grew from private landowners' tunnels into a 30 km pedestrian metro
Each owner paid for a tunnel to the metro; a network effect joined about 35 separately owned chunks into one system.
Read the caseTesla pooled California Powerwall homes into PG&E's commercial-only demand program
By bundling home batteries into one 'facility', Tesla let owners earn $2 per kWh in a program meant for commercial users.
Read the caseSRI doubles rice yields by planting fewer, younger seedlings and keeping fields drier
A method from 1980s Madagascar — fewer plants, less water — doubled Nepali yields and reached 20 million households with no agribusiness behind it.
Read the caseSnooCode gave every Ghanaian property a GPS code so ambulances stop hunting for kiosks
Sesinam Dagadu's app turns a GPS fix into a short code per property, needing no street names and working offline.
Read the caseColorado's San Luis Valley farmers voted to tax their own groundwater and cut pumping 30%
Facing a falling aquifer and state restrictions, growers priced each acre-foot pumped and farms stayed open.
Read the caseRichard Turere's Lion Lights: flashing solar bulbs that fool lions with a moving torch
An 11-year-old Maasai herder copied a walking torch with flashing solar lights, ending cattle losses of up to nine cows a week.
Read the caseRich Earth Institute turns neighbours' urine into farm fertiliser via haulers' permits
Vermont donors give 12,000 gallons of urine a year; pasteurised, it fertilises crops, and haulers' existing permits sidestep missing rules.
Read the casePolycom's founders solved speakerphone echo with a 95-cent RadioShack speaker-box book
A sealed acoustic-suspension speaker box isolated the microphones from the speaker, the trick behind Polycom's first product.
Read the casePivotal started every office day at 9.06am with a free breakfast and a gong
Rob Mee set an oddly precise 9.06am start, free breakfast and 6pm exit so programmers arrive together and work uninterrupted.
Read the caseNHS England pilots a pocket-sized DNA sequencer that types brain tumours during surgery
An Oxford Nanopore sequencer cuts brain-tumour diagnosis from up to eight weeks to two hours, in time to shape the operation.
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