Haqdarshak turned welfare discovery into a paid job for rural women
India's welfare money sat unspent because nobody knew their entitlements; Haqdarshak mapped 7,000 schemes and sent trained agents door to door.
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 UPDATEDInstacart beat the VMAs' no-outside-food rule by making the snacks the dress
Blocked from bringing snacks to the VMAs, Instacart sent Chloe Fineman down the red carpet in a couture gown made of candy.
Read the caseBrandenberger stopped coating fabric and made a film itself
Jacques Brandenberger, chasing a waterproof tablecloth, peeled his stiff coating off and sold the transparent film instead.
Read the caseCalPERS capped what it pays for hip and knee surgery, and hospital prices fell
Facing five-fold price variation for joint replacements, CalPERS set one reference price; members pay excess, so hospitals cut prices.
Read the caseAldi France bought back scalped air dryers and resold them cheap
Back to Discount proved everyday low price by reversing resale arbitrage in 48 hours.
Read the caseNPCI's UPI Circle delegated payments so one bank account serves a whole family
Instead of forcing everyone to open an account, UPI Circle lets a trusted payer authorize family members to spend from the same account within a set limit.
Read the caseJapan's residency match: a market-design fix for regional caps (2009–2012)
Japan's 2009 regional caps made the residency match unstable and gameable; Kamada & Kojima's flexible deferred acceptance restored both properties.
Read the caseMumbai Dabbawalas route lunches with color codes, not addresses
Mumbai Dabbawalas, low-literacy couriers, route 200k lunches daily by using a fixed code of colors and symbols instead of written addresses.
Read the caseMOSIP open-sourced the national-ID stack so any country could own its Aadhaar
Countries kept asking India for an Aadhaar of their own; IIIT Bangalore answered with a free, modular, vendor-neutral platform — MOSIP.
Read the caseRed Label made India's first transgender pop band its ad and won the Glass Lion
Instead of making an ad about inclusion, Brooke Bond Red Label built the band itself - six hijra singers whose videos reached 25 million people.
Read the caseAisin 1997: Toyota's suppliers rebuilt a burned brake-valve plant in five days
A fire erased 99% of Toyota's P-valve supply with four hours of stock on hand; 36 suppliers improvised 50 lines and output restarted in five days.
Read the case*99# put every Indian bank inside a ₹1,000 feature phone, no internet needed
NPCI won one shared USSD short code for all banks, so a basic handset with no data plan could do interbank transfers on any network.
Read the caseKFC Australia hid overseas menu items in its app to drive sales
Kentucky Fly made app-only orders feel like a chance to win a real food trip.
Read the caseDocracy tracked daily ToS changes as diffs so users skipped rereading 27-page contracts
Docracy checked popular Terms of Service daily and published what changed, catching backdated updates and drawing 200 points on Hacker News in 2013
Read the caseHDF5 rebuilt the scientific data format for big parallel datasets and won
NCSA's HDF5 (1998) kept HDF's self-describing files but added 64-bit sizes and parallel I/O; it became science's standard.
Read the caseMedieval Islamic merchants moved money with the suftaja, a fee-based payment order
Medieval Islamic merchants moved money via suftaja, charging a flat fee instead of interest to honor the riba ban.
Read the caseMotional gave safety drivers faithful explanations of a robotaxi's decisions
Motional and MIT inserted CW-Net into an autonomous planner so safety drivers saw causal concepts in real time and predicted surprises more accurately.
Read the caseadidas made a billboard women could swim in to launch modest swimwear in Dubai
To launch inclusive swimwear in MENA, adidas built the world's first swimmable billboard on a Dubai beach — the ad was the product demo.
Read the caseHusk Power ran village mini-grids on rice husks nobody could burn
A chip cost-optimizer turned Bihar's waste husk into 32-kilowatt plants serving 500 homes each — evening light for half the price of kerosene.
Read the caseRuPay ended Visa and Mastercard's duopoly from inside welfare banking
NPCI's RuPay card rode free inside every Jan Dhan account — passing Visa and Mastercard on debit cards by 2017 and taking 69% of the market by 2023.
Read the case