Adaptive Engineering is a phrase made up one Saturday afternoon in a back-garden garage by a father & son, working on a car. A friend suggested that some bodging had been done to make a part designed for one vehicle fit another – the response of “it’s not bodging, it’s adaptive engineering” was uttered, and has since become phrase often used.
It can be applied to a number of situations where ingenuity, technical skill and an outside-of-the-box approach is applied to solving a problem.