Today Anssi Vanjoki — Nokia‘s Executive VP & General Manager of Multimedia — said, “If there is something good in the world then we copy with pride.” He was talking about the iPhone. Nokia is apparently getting ready to market a device copied from Apple. Why not, is there something wrong with copying great concepts? I don’t think so. Steve Jobs once said, “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.“

Don’t get me wrong I think IPs are one of the most valuable assets for a company and should be protected from stealing. Copying concepts is a totally natural thing and has been going on since early days of humanity. Do you think somebody had a patent of the wheel? I think not :)
When you copy something you learn. You discover new things and try immensely hard to understand every detail of the product/service you are copying. By doing so you learn a lot of stuff you did not know before and along with this process you may discover how to create things you would not able to even imagine before. From my own experience I can tell that one learns really a lot when trying to understand how stuff (products, websites, nature) works. The whole point of innovation is combine the various concepts you learned on different fields into a single, unique product or service.

One of Picasso‘s most known quotes: “Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.” I would add bad artists never get beyond copying into stealing (combining) ideas.