>>..isn't that what happened with Japan? First they just copied American TV and Radio designs.. That's correct. My dad worked in international sales for a com

>>..isn't that what happened with Japan? First they just copied American TV and Radio designs.. That's correct. My dad worked in international sales for a company that makes industrial equipment, from the early 1970s until the late 1990s. He says that in the early days, whenever he sold a product to a Japanese company, a few months later, one of his Japanese competitors would mysteriously come out with a product that seemed to look and function exactly like the one he just sold. It seems to me that it's not that different from how people learn - you start by copying what other people do, and even though you're not doing anything "new," you're learning the low-level basics of why things are the way they are, and then you use your unique perspective to spot ways to improve upon that.