Not Invented Here
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Not Invented Here (NIH) is a term used to describe a persistent corporate or institutional culture that either intentionally or unintentionally avoids using previously performed research or knowledge because the research and developed knowledge was not originally executed in-house. While the etymology is perhaps apocryphal, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is said either to be the direct inspiration for the term -- as a play on its acronym -- or simply as one of the worst examples of the culture of "Not Invented Here".
In many cases NIH occurs as a result of simple ignorance, as many companies simply never do the research to know whether a solution already exists. Also common, however, are deliberate cases where the organization's staff rejects a known solution because they don't take the time to understand it fully before rejecting it; because they would have to embrace new concepts in infrastructure or terminology; or because they believe they can produce a superior product. As a result, much effort and money is wasted on a solution that in many cases was already developed elsewhere.
Usage in Computing
The computer industry has seen many alleged examples of Not Invented Here syndrome. Some, for example, say Apple during the evolution of the Mac OS through OS 9 did not copy many User Interface innovations found in other operating systems simply because they went against or were not discussed in Apple's original human interface guidelines. These critics say that this was an example of Apple irrationally rejecting any change not invented by themselves. Silicon Graphics was also heavily critized in the late '90's for sticking with their proprietary OS and CPU's when it was becoming clear that commodity x86 hardware had a better price-to-performance ratio.
NIH syndrome and Open Source
Many in the Open Source community are familiar with the NIH syndrome, as well. Hackers and open source programming groups often "re-invent the wheel" many times over. At any one time, there are several programmers and/or groups working on different projects that, in effect, accomplish the same things as an existing solution. This is usually due to pride, ignorance, being discontent with some aspect of the existing solution, or simply the desire to create for creation's sake.
Many free software licenses, such as copyleft licenses, can also contribute to NIH, in that a company may be too afraid to take on the risk of being forced to open-source their project in the future, even if a complete free solution exists. Over time this has led some large companies to reject almost all free software under any license, even for purely internal work, although such use might result in massive savings in both the short-term (development costs) and long-term (maintenance costs and costs associated with poor quality of the internal tool).
Further reading
- Katz & Allen, Investigating the Not Invented Here (NIH) Syndrome: a look at the performance, tenure and communication patterns of 50 R&D project groups. R&D Management vol. 12, pp. 7-19, 1982.