not invented here
- idiom
- Jargon
:
no inventado aquí
- A lot of the comments seem to have the old "Not invented here" mentality I recall from my Microsoft days.
Examples
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The team's refusal to consider external software reflected their strong not invented here attitude.
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Not invented here...
Blog text (15) -
Her decision to develop a new solution despite effective options available was driven by a not invented here mindset.
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They missed out on making progress due to their not invented here culture, which discouraged outside ideas.
Synonyms
1
9.3
A habit of rejecting outside ideas and preferring in-house solutions
A strong dislike of new ideas or change
A strong dislike of new things or change
How Open
Surface Forms
Morphology
The literal words ('not' + 'invented' + 'here') clearly signal that something was created elsewhere, so a learner can infer the referent concerns origin. However, the conventional meaning — an attitudinal or organizational reluctance to adopt external ideas — is a pragmatic, domain-specific extension (business jargon) that is not fully predictable from the parts, so it is only partially transparent to a B1 learner.
Etymology
Not invented here may come from teams or workshops that refused tools or ideas made by others. If something was not invented here, they would not 'adopt' it, so the phrase now means an unwillingness to use outside ideas or products.