Chinese companies usually tend to adopt an imitation strategy rather than the independent development. However, the Chinese electric bicycle company Luyuan Group implements innovation-oriented R&D strategy in its infancy stage by setting separate R&D departments. This company produces bicycles with independent intellectual property by successfully separating the fundamental research department and product development department. Therefore, in order to clarify how the change of the organization structure promoted the engineers ’ability, this study investigates the career formation processes of the development engineers by conducting interviews. According to the results, matrix development structure, which is the result of organization changes, can both foster multi-faceted skills and maintain the expertise of engineers. Moreover, Luyuan Group trains the professional experts with another route to facilitate the multi-skill engineers to complete development projects. In summary, Luyuan Group improves multiple abilities and mutual coordination of engineers by instructing them with two different career formation routes, thus leading to the successful product development.
