Modeling the Mechanics of Polymorphism in Bacterial Flagella. Development of a phenomenological model

This copy-alter technique has been applied even to completed applications. Airline companies traded frequent-flyer applications in the late 1990s. A frequent flyer application, by itself, provides little competitive advantage to an airline company. So one company would recover development costs by selling its frequent flyer application to its competitor. The buyer received a graphical model that generated application code that would need tuning, and the actual, generated and tuned code from the previous company. The buyer recognized that the application would not be quite correct but that it would take less effort to alter it than to build it from scratch. Glass (1995, p.182) tells that a first design model "may very well be a reused model rather than one created by the designer in response to this particular problem. Visser (1987) discovered that, for problems encountered before, designers employ an 'example program' as their starting point, and then observed, 'Designers rarely start from scratch.'" You can and should start taking advantage of people's strengths in copying and altering work samples ...»