Inventing is not the same as problem solving. Nor is it the same as adapting existing ideas and techniques to suit a purpose. Inventing is about creating something brand new.
About his own inventions, Edison said "What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration." What I have to say here is about the one per cent. That one per cent has three components.
- Every invention has a purpose. It does something useful: lobbing a projection over a wall, providing a source of artificial light, performing mechanical calculations with remarkable speed and accuracy.
- Every invention has an approach, an idea, a specific notion about how to do what it purports to do: pack gunpowder behind the projectile in a tube and set the gunpowder afire, pass a current through a thin conductor, connect non-linear electronic components in a way that embodies some calculation or another.
- Behind almost every invention is a rationale as to why it should work. Bad rationales lead to non-inventions: Ouija boards, flying machines based on flapping wings, and so on. Good inventions are based on good rationales: electrical current passing through a thin conductor emits light in the visible spectrum. Machine theory teaches us that any computation can be implemented in a finite-state machine.
Better yet, work out how these three elements map to our little project.
- What is the intention behind an intentional community based on social capital? Is the creation of this community an end in itself or is the aim something else, say, rescuing society, or at least ourselves from all the evils of civilization pointed out by Quinn and others?
- What is the invention here? Is it some technique for creating and maintaining social capital? If so, what, specifically, is that technique? If not, what is the invention?
- If we can figure out what the invention is, what reason do we have to think that it will work? Will embody the secret to the Amish's success, whatever that may be, or something else?
