Real Case Stories

In 1908, Sears issued its first specialty catalog for houses,  Book of Modern Homes and Building Plans , featuring 44 kit-house styles ranging in price from the US $360–$2,890. That's the equivalent of US $9,147-$73,431 today .  Cover of 1922 Sears Modern Homes catalog As Sears mail-order catalogs were in millions of homes, large numbers of potential homeowners were able to open a catalog, see different house designs, visualize their new home and then purchase it directly from Sears.  Sears reported that more than 70,000 of these homes were sold in North America between 1908 and 1940. In late 1918, Sears conducted a “race,” building two houses, a Sears Honor Built the pre-cut kit home and an identical house with no pre-cut lumber.  The pre-cut Honor Bilt Rodessa was the easy winner in this race, with 231 hours to spare (compared to the stick-built house).  Today, those two houses are still standing side by side as Sears struggles ...

Founded in 1851, Corning Inc. is one of the world's biggest glassmakers today. It boasts of annual sales of nearly $10 billion and billions in annual profits. Developer and manufacturer of the now ubiquitous Gorilla Glass , Corning is another sterling example of a "superstar" firm. Corning has had a rich history of working with innovators from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs. In fact, innovation is one of the key values driving Corning's business strategy. Corning regularly invests a healthy 10 percent of its revenue in R&D ; to maintain and further it's technological leadership. And that's in good times  and  in bad. When the telecom bubble burst in 2000 and cratering fiber-optic prices sent Corning's stock from $100 to $1.50 per share by 2002, its CEO at the time reassured scientists that not only was Corning still about research but that R&D would be the path back to prosperity. Corning has continuously reinvented itself – moving fro...

Ray Kroc in the 1940s owned a successful Milkshake mixer distribution business. In the beginning of 1950s his business started to slow down. In the US there was an exodus from the cities to the suburbs and many neighborhood soda fountains were forced to close down. But one small restaurant in San Bernadino kept ordering more machines. He flew down and met the McDonald brothers who ran the restaurant. When Ray Kroc joined the McDonald brothers, he envisaged thousands of Mc Donalds outlets across the country. In trying to identify the best locations, he used to fly over towns looking for church steeples. He believed that good American families would live around churches and that's the kind of customers he was looking for. src Consumer Behavior by Schiffman/Kumar

Author Kevin Ashton, speaks about what led to the coining of "The Internet of Things"  in his book " How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention and Discovery ". A popular shade of lipstick by P&G was not being adequately restocked on store shelves. Half of the stores were out of stock at any given point of time and it was the customers who were noticing it and either buying another shade or leaving the store without buying it. In the late 90s inventory information was stored in computes and manually keyed in. Store workers did not have time to go and look at the shelf and key in information about availability or lack of it. He attached a small radio microchip to the lipstick and an antenna on the shelf which connected to the internet to update the information and initially called it the "Storage system". He later extended this to all P&G products like diapers, potato chips, detergent and coined the term "Internet of Thi...

How Music Got Free is a riveting story of obsession, music, crime, and money, featuring visionaries and criminals, moguls and tech-savvy teenagers. It’s about the greatest pirate in history, the most powerful executive in the music business, a revolutionary invention and an illegal website four times the size of the iTunes Music Store. Journalist Stephen Witt traces the secret history of digital music piracy, from the German audio engineers who invented the mp3, to a North Carolina compact-disc manufacturing plant where factory worker Dell Glover leaked nearly two thousand albums over the course of a decade, to the high-rises of midtown Manhattan where music executive Doug Morris cornered the global market on rap, and, finally, into the darkest recesses of the Internet. Through these interwoven narratives, Witt has written a thrilling book that depicts the moment in history when ordinary life became forever entwined with the world online—when, suddenly, all the music ever re...

When Nobel laureate Economist Milton Friedman was consulting with an Asian nation government in the 1960s he visited a site of a large scale public works project and found workers shoveling but not using any heavy equipment like bull dozers, tractors or heavy equipment. On enquiring he was told that the purpose of the project was to provide jobs. To which he drly remarked "Why don't you give worker's spoons instead of shovels?" In the book " Rise of the Robots: Technology and the threat of a jobless future " the author cites this story and also speaks about the looming threat of a jobless future with advancement of technology creating a jobless future.  In Rise of the Robots, Ford details what machine intelligence and robotics can accomplish, and implores employers, scholars, and policy makers alike to face the implications. The past solutions to technological disruption, especially more training and education, aren't going to work, and we must deci...

This story talks about how an Entrepreneur started a paint shop but nobody would buy from his store. In the evenings he used to hang out with mechanics and body shop owners and over the course of time figure out that their biggest problem was wasted paint in body touch-ups. As the minimum paint can was of 500ml a lot of it would get wasted during small touch up works. He then pioneered the concept of packaging paint in small cigarette tin boxes (125ml) and thus the CT (cigarette tin) measure was born in Mangalore.

Schumpeter's gale, is a concept in economics which since the 1950s has become most readily identified with the Austrian American economist Joseph Schumpeter who derived it from the work of Karl Marx and popularized it as a theory of economic innovation and the business cycle. src Wiki The "gale of creative destruction" describes the "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one". Companies that once revolutionized and dominated new industries – for example, Xerox in copiers or Polaroid in instant photography – have seen their profits fall and their dominance vanish as rivals launched improved designs or cut manufacturing costs. In technology, the cassette tape replaced the 8-track, only to be replaced in turn by the compact disc, which was undercut by downloads to MP3 players, which is now being usurped by web-based streaming services....

Dominos has been at the forefront of Digital innovation through their initiatives in making their ordering as idiot proof as possible. 1. Zero click ordering Just open Dominos Zero click app on your phone and after a 10 second count down the app will automatically place your order for the same pizza you bought the last time. 2. Order with an Emoji Just text a Pizza Emoji and get your order 3. Tweet an order Just tweet #Dominos #pizza and get your pizza

How a Girl from a remote Mexican slum won the All Mexico Math exam using the MIE method. Minimally invasive education (MIE) is a form of learning in which children operate in unsupervised environments. The methodology arose from an experiment done by Sugata Mitra while at NIIT in 1999, often called The Hole in the Wall On 26 January 1999, Mitra's team carved a "hole in the wall" that separated the NIIT premises from the adjoining slum in Kalkaji, New Delhi. Through this hole, a freely accessible computer was put up for use. This computer proved to be popular among the slum children. With no prior experience, the children learned to use the computer on their own. This prompted Mitra to propose the following hypothesis: The acquisition of basic computing skills by any set of children can be achieved through incidental learning provided the learners are given access to a suitable computing facility, with entertaining and motivating content and some minimal (human) guida...

In his book Thinking in New Boxes , author Luc speaks about a case of how BIC, manufacturers of Ball point pens, got into Lighter manufacturing and disposable razors business. BIC started as a stationery company and purveyor of popular low-cost ballpoint pens. Business was healthy, but BIC wanted to grow. Had BIC thought of itself as a “pen” company, it might have focused solely on expanding its range of pens with new colors, new sizes, and new price points. But one executive perceived a new box. BIC was not in the pen business, it was in the “inexpensive disposable plastic items” business. With this breakthrough change to a different box, the company opened its eyes to a host of new opportunities—disposable lighters, razors, and even precharged mobile phones. BIC and its sales soared. BIC launched its first disposable lighters in 1973 and its first disposable shavers in 1975 eventually becoming the global market leader in pocket lighters and number 2 position globally for ...

Costa Rica has managed to run on renewable energy for 113 days straight. In 2015 it relied on nothing but renewables for 285 days of the year. In total, Costa Rica provided 99% of its energy needs last year with renewables alone. The majority of this power comes from hydroelectric plants. Costa Rica is also diversifying with ventures in geothermal energy and solar. Source: FastCo

MIT's Richard Locke researched  2 Nike tshirt factories in Mexico. These two factories have many similarities - both are in Mexico, both are in the apparel industry, both produce more or less the same products for Nike (and other brands) and both are subject to the same code of conduct. Plant 1 gave workers complete freedom to decide production targets, team organization and managing production plants and schedule. Employees work in teams and are also responsible for routine maintenance of equipment. Jobs are rotated and they value knowing how to perform a variety of operations and claimed that this opportunity to work on several operations plus in teams significantly improved working conditions. Every morning, the supervisors communicate to each team the style and quantity of products they need to produce. The workers would get together and discuss amongst themselves how much they can actually produce and then meet with the supervisor and agree on the production target f...

In their book "How Google Works" Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg speak about the Google work culture. Google encourages people to stay longer in office and keep them in cramped quarters. In order to do this they have free food, games on campus, bring your family to work and an open cluttered and cramped office where people are in close proximity to each other. This constant interaction with people in the office brings out new ideas, breaks communication barriers and keeps the flow of information which is difficult in the case of a work from home environment. A very good example cited in the book is that Google's Adsense product which developed into a multibillion dollar business was invented by a group of engineers from different teams who were playing pool in the office. Read the book

In this article from Fastcompany which talks about Microsoft's Radical type of design thinking where the core of the Designing philosophy was to think from a Disabled person's perspective. It talks about how many great inventions happened thinking of the disabled in mind. Pellegrino Turri built the first typewriter, so that his blind lover, could write letters more legibly. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone to support his work helping the deaf. Vint Cerf programmed the first email protocols for the nascent Internet. Electronic messaging was the only seamless way to communicate with his wife, who was deaf, while he was at work. Designing so that the disabled can have universal access—we can create products better for everyone else.  One excellent example is that if you want to create a phone or an app that's easier to interact while driving. You could study people driving with their phones or you could study how Blind people interact with their phones. How ...

When 17 year old Anya Pogharian saw a $30,000 price tag for a conventional dialysis machine she was so shocked that she decided to make her own dialysis machine which she did at a cost of $500. She volunteered in the dialysis unit at Montreal General Hospital. The time spent in that unit inspired her with the idea of trying to devise a dialysis machine affordable to patients in developing countries. She built a prototype which her school selected for entry into the Montreal Regional Expo-Science fair. This lead to Provincial science fair and finally the Canada Wide Science Fair where she was awarded bronze.  Read more on her site Dialysave Read her interview with Fortune here