Nov 15, 2007 ... IPY leads to accelerated level of discovery ... international collaboration and more big-picture, thinking-outside-the-box science. ...
www.earthtoday.net/news/viewsr.rss.html?pid=26041 - 24k - Cached

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Note added at 30 mins (2009-05-20 07:35:15 GMT)
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to discover...

This keeps the English idiom (instead of just translating a French idiom which not only doesn't exist in English but has a specific and recent French political-cultural context) but at the same time includes the notion that reiniventing the wheel is no way to make new discoveries, so including the candle-light bulb idea

French term (edited): ce n’est pas en améliorant la bougie que l’on invente la lampe à incandesce

Idiom Definitions for 'Reinvent the wheel'
If someone reinvents the wheel, they waste their time doing something that has already been done by other people, when they could be doing something more worthwhile.
Category: Transport & Travel

View examples in Google: Reinvent the wheel

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Note added at 2 hrs (2009-05-20 09:34:28 GMT)
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http://www.corporeality.net/museion/2008/12/20/reinventing-t...
Emotions in science — reinventing the wheel
I’m fascinated by how often scholars of science studies reinvent the wheel — because they are ignorant of other approaches to science than their own myopic perspective.

For example, I just stumbled over an otherwise excellent article — “Counting Corncrakes: The Affective Science of the UK Corncrake Census”, Social Studies of Science, vol 38, 377-405, 2008 — in which Jamie Lorimer, a postdoc at the Oxford University Centre for the Environment, discusses how emotions play a role in scientific work.


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Note added at 2 hrs (2009-05-20 09:35:34 GMT)
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The "example sentence" is in fact the URL for the first part of the post.

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Note added at 3 hrs (2009-05-20 10:34:39 GMT)
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THE standard UK and US idiom :


http://www.wisegeek.com/what-does-reinvent-the-wheel-mean.ht...

The idiom, "reinvent the wheel," is an English saying of unknown origin that is largely used to describe an exercise in futility. Many people will say, “Don’t reinvent the wheel” when they are starting upon a task, meaning that some foundational aspects of the task don’t need to be changed or replicated, as this would be a waste of time. The wheel in this idiom refers to the actual invention of the wheel, and the fact that this invention changed human history, and could be considered a near perfect advancement. The term can stands as symbol for advances in various forms of technology that are thought relatively perfect and don’t require reinvention in order to build something else.


http://www.courtinnovation.org/_uploads/documents/Dont Reinv...

Document title : “Don’t reinvent the wheel”.



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Note added at 9 days (2009-05-29 08:10:05 GMT) Post-grading
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If you have actually adopted the literal version originally suggested by Vicky, who has gone back on her original posting, then I think, although it is understandable, it means that you are missing out on the opportunity to use a perfectly standard English idiom which means exactly the same thing. Whether you go for my version, the bog standard one, or a reworked version, (cf. Yorick's answer), is a question of choice. But it would be a real shame not to use the English idiom, for a smooth natural result, don't you think?
it really does mean exactly the same thing!
PS whetehr or not folks do reinvent the wheel is neither here nor there. People have also found new sources of light... you can't take issue with the idom. You either use it or not but - as a personal rule - I don't corrupt or pevert them, unless I have an extremely solid linguistic reason to do so! There are of course occasions when there is a deliberate play on words with an idiomatic expression and those are hellishly tough to deal with. that is not the case here.