Personal experience dealing with a team that reverse-engineered industrial hardware. They would acquire competitors' products and hand them off to teardown team

Personal experience dealing with a team that reverse-engineered industrial hardware. They would acquire competitors' products and hand them off to teardown teams who weren't allowed direct communications with the rest of engineering. These strictures may have been a legal artifact of the company's significant background in software as well as hardware dev, or perhaps to deal with contractual issues, but they were firmly enforced.