Having a look to see how they did it is fine. Copying it is sinful. Working out how to do it even better is the best thing.
Copying is playing catch-up. If you want your business to thrive, you gotta play leap-frog
An oriental competitor brought out a box competing with one of ours. Shall I just say that investigation of a unit showed an uncanny resemblance in the key areas, even down to a couple of bits of suboptimal design in ours.
David