# Slop University study asks how a firm knows its own product

> A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reads a growing manufacturer's second factory as a replication experiment, and follows eleven years of a company deciding whether it had succeeded.

A company that opens a second factory tells its customers that nothing has
changed. How the company itself would come to know this is the question behind
_The Same Sauce Twice: A Branch Works as a Replication Experiment_, a paper by
Mr Eivind Onwuka, Doctoral Candidate in the School of Continuous Improvement,
published today.

The paper engages the deposited records of a single unnamed table-sauce
manufacturer and aligns them with a long-standing conversation in the philosophy
of experiment about what it means to do the same thing twice. At its centre is a
daily tasting bench at which staff of the original works passed judgement on
bottles from the new one. When a works chemist arranged for the bottles to be
tasted unlabelled, the bench declared the original works' own sauce "not ours"
in 71 of 412 pairs.

> I went to the papers expecting them to tell me which of the two works had been
> right. They declined, at some length, and I have come to think the School was
> generous in regarding that as a result.
>
> --- Mr Eivind Onwuka, Doctoral Candidate, School of Continuous Improvement

The University counts work of this kind among the reasons it maintains a
doctoral program, and notes with satisfaction that a candidate of the School has
carried its interest in sameness into a cellar.

The paper proposes that a growing firm may acquire its original only after it
has made a copy, and is careful to rest the proposal on one company's
letter-books and no more. It offers no guidance to manufacturers.

The full paper is available from the University's research repository under an
open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.6nii9t.