Solution Factory

A solution factory is a factory that produces mental solution components (memes) to a social system problem. Tomorrow’s leading activist NGOs will no longer be activist NGOs. They will be solution factories. The approximate work flow process they may use is shown below.

An ordinary factory produces physical products. A solution factory produces mental products. The output of a solution factory is the memes and meme carriers needed to solve a problem and keep it solved indefinitely. These are created by using a formal process that works so well it’s almost like using an assembly line. But, unlike an assembly line, solution factories do not produce physical products. They produce mental products which in turn cause new emergent properties to appear in the social system with the problem. It is these emergent properties that solve the problem.

You may think a new kind of factory is impossible. But it’s been done before.

Thomas Edison opened the world’s first invention factory in 1876 in Menlo Park, New Jersey, with the astounding pronouncement that he would “invent some minor thing every ten days and some big thing every six months.” And he did it. Out of his invention factory came the light bulb, the carbon button telephone microphone, the phonograph, and many more inventions. By the time he retired, “the wizard of Menlo Park” had accumulated 1,093 patents, more than any other single individual in the world. Others followed in his footsteps. Today there are hundreds of thousands of industrial research laboratories.

Invention factories have become the new Normal Science for creating physical inventions. But that model has drifted so far that it is now in crisis. Normal invention factories have proven themselves incapable of producing the solution components necessary for solving civilization's greatest problems, such as war and environmental sustainability. The Model Revolution step of the next Kuhn Cycle to find a new type of factory that can solve these problems has already begun. The appearance of think tanks, which create mental solutions to easier social problems, is a start. But today's think tanks have a long way to go before they are capable of solving the truly difficult problems that civilization now faces. This is because think tanks, as practiced today, do not employ the use of formal process, the Scientific Method, memetics, and system dynamics as the core of their work flow.

For much, much more on this topic, please see the chapter on Solution Factories in the manuscript to Analytical Activism. This is the final chapter in the book, because it takes the entire rest of the book to work up to this new model. It is a model that we hope will help end the Model Revolution step quickly and thus begin the next step, which is the Paradigm Change that takes problem solvers forward to being able to solve the global environmental sustainability problem in time.