The Volokh Conspiracy

A colleague of mine wants examples that would go in these paragraphs (paragraphs that are broken up here for easier reading online):

Businesses often seek to find new applications for existing products. Hummers, the transport of choice of the Governor of California, began as a multipurpose military vehicle known as Humvees. And the commonly prescribed drug for erectile dysfunction, Viagra, was initially designed to treat hypertension. [** Here is where the examples should go, either to supplement or to supplant the Hummers / Viagra examples. **]

Here, we examine whether the dual income tax regimes (that is, the explicit separate taxation of income from capital and income from labor) found in the Nordic countries might provide a useful model for developing countries. We appreciate that transplanting legal regimes or using prescription drugs for other purposes — known as “off-label uses” in pharmaceutical jargon — is often misguided and may result in undesirable and unintended consequences. And the economic, political, and tax environment in the Nordic countries differ greatly from the circumstance in most developing countries.

Nonetheless, while the dual income tax regimes in the Nordic countries were designed specially to address a problem that does not exist in many developing countries, the approach of explicitly providing separate tax regimes for income from capital and income from labor in developing countries may substantially improve the tax regimes of those countries....

Any suggestions? Again, we're looking for examples of products that originally served market or application A, looked like they wouldn't work well for market or application B, but, to many people's surprise, worked just fine for B, though perhaps different reasons than the ones that made them work in A. Please post them in the comments. Thanks!