Gold Peak Electronics Company

GPE as an electronic manufacturing company achieved $US189.7 million with 70% of its profit is from the electronics division. Furthermore, the company is well respected with its technologically advanced designing and manufacturing of premium professional advanced home electronics products. Acquisition of KEF and Celestion companies was helpful to GPE. The companies had well established Research and Development (R&D) capabilities. The managing director of Hong Kong-based Gold Pick Industries, Brian Li aimed at leveraging the already established KEF and Celestion brand R&D centres in the innovative manufacturer of high-end loudspeakers. The acquisition goes a long way in helping the company with continual technology development, distribution channels, talent and R&D expertise and markets. Although GPE experience difficulties in integrating the new companies in knowledge sharing and creation, over the years, the level of R&D activity gradually increased which increased the company's innovation of high-end products.

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Research and Development is an important department in any company. With regards to GPE, R&D will help in innovation, and in acquiring KEF and Celestion, it would help the company in knowledge sharing despite their geographical distance. Certain factors, however, limit sharing of knowledge, which affect trust and cohesion among team members. Geographical distance as one of the issues affects cohesion. The distance between the acquired KEF and Celestion and GPE created a barrier in terms of technological and social limitations in communication. During the initial stages, human face to face interaction was essential for building a string acquisition team setup. Furthermore, the distance created difficulty in managing global projects, although, integration of virtual teams by use of information technology, level of integration between team members, availability and the facilities ought to be put into consideration. Cultural issues as well are limiting factors affecting cohesion between team members. Both regions have different languages and cultural differences. Therefore, transfer of information desiring communication would be faced with setbacks in terms of understanding different perspectives among members. Successful product design depends majorly on efficient communication and collaborations among team members. Temporal issues such as employee's resistance affected the company's collaboration with the newly acquired companies. GPE encountered resistance form home employees with regards to globalization of R&D and innovation.

The company can employ different methods to motivate British engineers so as to improve innovation in Hong-Kong and Chinese location. To motivate the British engineers so that they can share innovation knowledge with their Chinese team members, the company can employ ways which will not put the British engineers' job security at risk. With their jobs at a risk, the engineers are reluctant to share innovation knowledge with Chinese and Hong-Kong regions. Innovation in Chinese and Hong-Kong regions can be improved by taking sections of engineers from the region to the UK periodically in sections so that they can be incorporated with the working of the already established and innovative British engineers. Furthermore, Chinese and Hong-Kong engineers can be subjected to a learning environment thought by the British engineers to improve their expertise.

GPE can create an efficient work environment that improves collaboration between the various R&D centres of GPE by overcoming the distance barrier between the UK, China and Hong-Kong which will promote innovation. This can be done by establishing of efficiently working communication channels and knowledge sharing capabilities.

China is faced with various challenges in education which discourage creative thinking and rarely accept mavericks. Furthermore, the education system emphasizes on theory and memorizing facts but does not put much focus on problem-solving and teamwork which is needed in R&D. Business practices is a challenge as well in China affected by educational practices where workers subscribed to entrenched hierarchical values, which as a result limited innovation. Intellectual property rights as wee is a challenge in China affects its innovation capabilities since they are less willing to trust outsiders. They prefer working with those similar to them which as a result undermined collaboration with terms from the outside community.