Retro-engineer

On other occasions, where the technical basis for the initial entry cannot be defended, the second mover has the advantage, since it may well be less costly to retro-engineer a product than to have invented and innovated it.

I suspected that's why I could so easily retro-engineer and re-invent their ultra-superior and advanced technology.

He was an engineer, it was his responsibility to retro-engineer the saucer and its components, to find out how it could do what it had done.

You can retro-engineer it. You look at a roomful of junk and you pay attention to what's lying on what, because that will eventually tell you what fell first.

It may have been the case that Plato and the Academy were attempting to retro-engineer an ideal government based on existing models of past experiments in political reform.

If you can retro-engineer Sauron's ring, it isn't as magical anymore. It's a matter of the characters getting control of the material, as opposed to being in a situation or universe where this is not really possible.

Use the functional interaction with your best performers to retro-engineer a mission, values, and culture check-in.

Set out the ambitions within a realistic time-frame, and re-engineer what you need to achieve in order to get there, taking into account possible interdependencies between different communication elements. This is altogether not very different from any IT project: define your goals, break it into smaller pieces, work out the interdependencies, and retro-engineer the goals into how you're going to get there.