Ever notice an idea gets a cold reception the moment it comes from another team? That’s Not Invented Here. This week I dig into why our brains treat “not ours” as “not good,” what it cost teams I worked on at GE, and how to catch it early. When your team says an outside idea “won’t work for us,” are you evaluating the idea, or just the team it came from? Not Invented Here is the tendency to reject or undervalue ideas, tools, and research that come from outside your own team, while overvaluing the stuff you built yourselves. The catch is that it never announces itself. It feels like you have standards, or you know your users, when really the source of the idea is doing the evaluating for you in the background. The term goes back to a 1982 study by Ralph Katz and Thomas Allen at MIT, who tracked fifty R&D groups and found that the longer a team stayed together, the less it talked to the outside sources it most needed to hear from. Performance slid as a result. Later work from David Antons and Frank Piller reframed it as an attitude rather than a behavior, a standing negative feeling toward anything labeled “external,” whether that label comes from a different company, department, discipline, or just a different job title. On product teams, this shows up everywhere once you start looking. Engineers’ UX suggestions get waved off because usability is “our lane.” Agency research gets its methodology questioned the second it contradicts the team’s assumptions, while a single hallway conversation gets treated as solid evidence. Ten squads rebuild nearly the same component ten different ways because the shared version doesn’t quite work for us, and then nobody trusts the design system anymore. If your team has ever quietly shelved a good finding because it came from the wrong people, this one’s for you. Give it a listen. Topics: • 00:00 - The reflex that rejects an idea before you've even looked at it • 03:00 - The GE story: a mandate to adopt one design system called Cirrus • 04:00 - Every team pushes back with the same "that won't work for us" • 05:00 - Defining not invented here and the 1982 Katz and Allen study • 06:00 - Why long-tenured teams stop talking outward, and the shift from behavior to attitude • 07:00 - Why your brain does it: ownership, effort, identity, and the IKEA effect connection • 08:00 - The measurable cost, and Spolsky's defense of building in-house • 09:00 - How the bias hides behind "our context is different" • 10:00 - How it hits research and design systems, and where the IKEA effect sneaks in • 11:00 - Engineering rewrites, competitor patterns, and acquired teams • 12:00 - Turning the bias around with "proudly found elsewhere" • 13:00 - Separate the source from the substance, and watch your team's own boundaries • 14:00 - Give ownership before adoption, and treat build versus adopt as a real decision • 15:00 - Audit your outside input, and back to the Cirrus lesson — Thanks for listening! We hope you dug today’s episode. If you liked what you heard, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts! And if you really enjoyed today’s episode, why don’t you leave a five-star review? Or tell some friends! It will help us out a ton. If you haven’t already, sign up for our email list. We won’t spam you. Pinky swear. • Get a FREE audiobook AND support the show • Support the show on Patreon • Check out show transcripts • Check out our website • Subscribe on Apple Podcasts • Subscribe on Spotify • Subscribe on YouTube • Subscribe on Stitcher
