Your company may already have an approach for continual improvement, such as Six Sigma or Total Quality Management. If so, you can simply integrate IP protection into your existing improvement program without “reinventing the wheel.”

My comments:

An American idiom, this phrase usually appears in the negative, e.g. “you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

Meaning?

You may need to make small changes and improvements, but there is no need to uproot and overhaul the whole existing system.

The wheel is what makes a vehicle move, and this ring-shaped thing has been around for thousands of years. People may use different materials these days to make the wheel tougher and smoother to run, but last time I checked, it is still round shaped.

Hence, by saying one doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel, they mean to say that minor adaptations or changes are needed instead of anything radical.

In our example, “you can integrate IP protection into your existing improvement program without” developing a brand new system from scratch.

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本文僅代表作者本人觀點，與本網立場無關。歡迎大家討論學術問題，尊重他人，禁止人身攻擊和發布一切違反國家現行法律法規的內容。

About the author:

Zhang Xin（張欣） has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.