What Does Reinventing the Wheel Mean?

The phrase “reinventing the wheel” is often heard in the business world and immediately it can bring confusion as to what this phrase means.

Essentially, it is a phrase that is used to describe creating a solution for a problem that may already have an existing solution. The idea behind this is that you are trying to recreate something while expending unnecessary effort that could otherwise be used somewhere else. In other words, you are investing a lot of effort into an issue that has already been taken care of.

For example, if you were asked to come up with a solution for a collecting customer payments process, and it turns out that there is already an online payment service available, then you would be “reinventing the wheel” by creating a solution from scratch, when one has already been created. The end result of this would be using unnecessary resources to create something when the problem has already been solved.

The phrase could also be applied when trying to make improvements on something that already exists. When used in this capacity, it could help you identify solutions that are already in place and find ways to improve them to make them more efficient. In this instance, the wheel would remain the same but the process of using it would be optimized.

In summary, “reinventing the wheel” is a phrase that describes expending a lot of effort into an issue that has already been solved, either through existing processes or solutions. It’s important to understand this phrase in order to manage resources more effectively, identify existing solutions, and make improvements on them in order to reach your goals the most efficiently.