I mean, clearly copying and reference in art and culture is somewhat different from product development - art and culture is competitive in a different way from

I mean, clearly copying and reference in art and culture is somewhat different from product development - art and culture is competitive in a different way from product development. But one of the things that I've thought of is that copying with understanding greatly increases your 'success rate'. I think you can find that in the heart of the standard quote "Good artists copy; great artists steal". Great artists can copy with understanding and in doing so make it their own - thus steal. They now have a possession of sorts over whatever they took. Blindly copying in the extreme case results in the literal cargo-cults. Copying with too much effort and you lose your advantage (the whole point of copying to is save effort). Still doesn't give you a nice happy equation (or whatever) to figure out what to copy - but I think it lays down a rule of thumb that if you don't know why something works, copying it probably won't be great.