How do I create an object of an unknown type until method is called?

Question

I want to create a method that will accept any entity framework database model I've created and return me back another object of the same type. How do I create another object of the same type that I pass to this method?

public object CopyDBObject(object a) {

Type type = typeof(a).MakeGenericType(a.GetType());
object a1 = Activator.CreateInstance(type);

PropertyInfo[] propertys = a.GetType().GetProperties();
foreach (var property in propertys)
{
    //iterate through properties
    //set a1 properties equal to several a properties
}
return a1; }

Basically I just want "a1" to be the same type as "a" which I'm passing into this method.

At first I just had a line of code:

object a1 = new object();

but I got an error since "a1" was just a generic object, so I couldn't set its properties similar to what "a" has.

So I changed that line to these listed above:

Type type = typeof(a).MakeGenericType(a.GetType());
object a1 = Activator.CreateInstance(type);

but this doesn't work. I don't know what should be in place of "typeof(a)". The error says that it is "a is a variable being used like a type." When I set something to "a.GetType()" it does show me the correct object type for "a" that I passed it, but how do I set "a1" to be that same type?