Will biology replace the factory?

Here's a fact I can't stop thinking about.

Some of the strongest structures we can now make use about 95 percent less material than a solid block. Not by being clever with steel, but by copying how bone and coral are built: lattices, gaps, geometry doing the work that mass used to do. We can only design them because of the computing we have now.

I wrote about this in Radical Next. It's the tip of a much bigger shift.

What's the pattern?

For two hundred years, making something meant taking a lot of material and cutting, melting, or pressing it into shape. Extract, transport, machine, discard the rest. That's the factory, and it's the reason a car weighs as much as it does.

Biology never worked that way. A tree doesn't machine itself. It grows exactly what it needs, where it needs it, from air and water and light. And we're starting to build like that.

Concrete that seals its own cracks, with bacteria that wake up when water gets in. Leather grown from mycelium, the root structure of fungi, in weeks instead of the years a cow takes. Bricks grown by microbes at room temperature instead of fired in kilns. Buildings being printed, layer by layer, in lattices that look like jungle gyms under a microscope.

This is the pattern of every era: the new way arrives at the edges, looks like a novelty, and then quietly becomes the default. Electricity was a curiosity in factories for thirty years. Then it was the factory.

What should leaders do now?

So, three things. Especially if you make physical things.

Find your first grown material. Somewhere in your product is a component that could be grown rather than made. Packaging is usually first. Find it and pilot it.

Redesign for less, not just different. The lattice lesson applies everywhere. Ask what would happen if you used a tenth of the material. Then ask why you don't.

And put a biologist in the room. Manufacturing has been the domain of mechanical engineers for two centuries. The next factory needs someone who thinks in growth.

We didn't stop cutting wood because trees ran out. We'll stop machining because growing works better. That's the part worth getting ahead of.

What in your product could be grown instead of made?

Related: Why is the robot still waiting on the human?

Sam Rad, The Change Futurist. Keynote speaker on change, transformation, resilience, and AI adoption. Author of Radical Next. Book a keynote