The power of reverse engineering Reverse engineering is simple: take something that already works, figure out why, then build something better. It is one of the fastest ways to learn a skill or crack a problem, because you start miles ahead instead of at a blank page. The Romans knew this. Early in their first war with Carthage they had almost no navy, while Carthage ruled the sea. Then a Carthaginian warship ran aground, the Romans dragged it ashore, took it apart, and used it as the blueprint to build a whole fleet of their own. They did not stop at copying. They bolted on a boarding bridge called the corvus, which let their soldiers storm onto enemy decks and fight the way they were best, on foot. They copied the ship, added one idea of their own, and went on to win the war. That is the whole move: learn from what already works, then make it better. Here are four more of our favourites. The humble jerry can Early in WWII, Allied fuel cans were flimsy tins that leaked, and you needed a spanner and a separate funnel just to open and pour one. The German can was a thing of beauty. It was pressed from two steel halves joined by a single weld, so there was almost nothing to spring a leak. It had three handles, so one person could carry two full cans at once. An air pocket meant it floated if you dropped it in water. Best of all, it had a built-in spout with a flip-up lever that let you pour fast and clean, no funnel needed. The British got hold of one in 1940, copied it exactly, and named it after “Jerry”, their nickname for a German. The bomber copied to the last rivet In 1944, three American B-29 bombers, the most advanced aircraft of the war, landed in the Soviet Far East. Stalin told his top designer, Andrei Tupolev, to copy them exactly, as fast as possible. The team was almost comically literal. They reproduced the paint and even a repair patch from the original, partly to prove to Stalin’s secret police that they had obeyed, while quietly improving the parts that actually mattered. The precision is the astonishing bit. Even after converting every American inch into metric and swapping in Soviet metals, the finished aircraft came out within 1% of the original’s weight. Two years later, the USSR had its first bomber capable of carrying a nuclear weapon. The Compaq clean room In the 1980s, IBM ran the personal computer world, because it owned the BIOS, the small piece of code that boots the machine. Copy that legally and the whole market cracked open. So Compaq used a “clean room”. One team studied IBM’s code and wrote a plain description of what it did. A second team, who were never allowed to see the original, built a brand-new version from that description alone. It cost about a year and a million dollars, but the result was legally bulletproof, because the people who built it had provably never touched IBM’s code. That clean-room trick went on to open up the entire PC industry. The missile that flew home In 1958, an American Sidewinder, then the most advanced air-to-air missile in the world, hit a Chinese MiG and failed to explode. It lodged in the airframe, and the pilot flew home with it still stuck in the tail. The missile was handed to the Soviets, who took it apart and built their own. Their chief engineer called it “a university course in missile design”. And here is the kicker: years later, when the West got hold of the Soviet copy, they found its parts were interchangeable with a real American Sidewinder. They had cloned it that precisely. One key takeaway Every one of these began the same way: not with a flash of genius, but with a good hard look at something that already worked. Originality is a wonderful place to finish. It is a terrible place to start. Don’t start with a blank page. Start with something that already works. How to use it this week Keep a folder of things that work. Every ad, email or product that impresses you, save it. Next time you need an idea, start there instead of a blank screen. Ask why, not what. Copy the surface and you get a worse version. Find the principle underneath and you can use it anywhere. Steal from far away. The best ideas often come from a completely different industry, not your rival next door. One thing worth remembering: copying the thinking behind something is smart. Copying the thing itself, the exact look or the exact words, is lazy and often illegal. So learn how it works, then build your own, better version. Want to go deeper? This is the heart of our Disruptive Innovation and How to Be More Creative courses, both taught by working practitioners. It is our tenth birthday, so use code 4224 at checkout for a little something off. So next time you see something great, don’t just admire it. Take it apart and see how it works.