The collapse of communism faced Poland and other former Soviet bloc countries with the need for a massive “institutional refit”, as regards both economic and political institutions. This paper describes where some of the key new institutions were derived from (either in the form of transplants from other countries, revivals of pre-communist domestic institutions or completely new local “institutional innovations”), and proposes some tentative views as to why the particular developments we observe took place, and whether they corresponded to needs at the time. In the case of transplants, we attempt to explain why these were copied from one particular country rather than from others.