Of course it's done before. Most of the successful projects start with a replication.
It matters where it goes to
The Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard said once: It's not where you take things from - It's where you take things to. You may take a model and implement it by a much better method, or take a method and apply it in another field…
No one's asking you to be the originator of everything. We're asking you, to do things that matter for those who care. The terms for the transfer of innovations is technology transfer (to other users) and technology validation (to other usages). Both are addressing new exploitation opportunities.
Can rewriting be innovative?
The first thing I did in my first job in the mid 70s: migrate an APT system from the IBM mainframe to a General Automation mini computer - the first world-wide.
APT a high-level programming tool used to generate instructions for numerically controlled machine tools.
It was clear to me that each APT program needs to run on the GA as on the IBM. My APT compilers, interpreters and post processors were written in FORTRAN and different from those used in the IBM APT (because of limited resources on the GA, but also to apply my own ideas of geometric modeling…).
Was it innovative?
Later, I introduced a new language that was much more feature and task oriented…
The paradox of copying
Jorge Louis Borges, wrote a great short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote". Menard, a fictive character, did not compose another "Quixote", he produced a version that is re-written word by word. In this story, irony and paradox generate ambivalence. Menard's copy is not a mechanical transcription, it coincides with Miguel Cervantes' Quixote…
(Borges, Quixote) is different from (Menard, Quixote), because of "knowledge". I think Borges states through the paradox of Menard: all texts are a kind of rewriting other texts. Literature is composed of versions? The paradox of Menard is pushing the limits to the absurd and impossible, but it is about the principles of writing...
However, Menard's version would become more "different" if he offered a complete thorough Quixote course, a reading tour, a blog, a magazine, "how to write Quixote alike books" workouts…
Package know-how for me
It's a package of your products, services. How you dissemination that makes the innovativeness. Sure, it has been done before, but not by you and not for me.
