Abstract: China has caught up with and even surpassed some developed countries in the industrial sector of complex product systems such as telecommunication equipment, power generation control and grid protection systems, high-speed railways, large engineering equipment, large passenger aircraft in the past 20 years. This has challenged the popular view that enterprises in developing countries could never achieve technological catch-up given the high technical complexity and high organization and coordination requirements in the ?eld. Moreover, China has not used global product networks that once helped western enterprises gain and maintain their leading edge in the ?eld of complex product systems and became the dominate multi-national company pattern. Instead, local Chinese enterprises have adopted a pattern of engineer-centered enterprises. However, there is little literature to analyze this in depth. The literature in the field of multinational corporations and global value chains analyzes the organizational form and innovation models of global production networks, and why they fail in some industrial and technological contexts. The literature in the field of complex product systems focuses on some of the technical characteristics of complex product systems and their requirements for organizational forms. However, neither of the two literature analyzes what kind of organizational form and innovation model of multinational corporations is conducive to innovation competition in the industrial sectors of complex product systems, how it operates and what is its institutional basis. This article takes Huawei in the telecom-equipment industry and Nanrui Electric in the grid equipment industry as the cases and collects evidences through interviews, ?eld observation and document analysis. This article explores the growth path and sources of competitiveness of engineer-centered enterprises and finds that: with the “home-front” system, engineer-centered enterprises send engineering teams to local markets, acquire context-based knowledge through interactions with local users, and establish communications between the front line and formal R&D forces at the headquarters, which helps effectively respond to the problems and demands emerging in application scenarios, and promote organizational learning and technological capabilities. The “home-front” system is enabled by a set of organizational conditions. First, enterprises need to acquire enough high-quality engineers and organize them organically. Second, enterprises need to give engineers the leading power in strategic decision-making to ensure the long-term commitment to technical competence rather than utilitarianism and short-term profit. At the same time, only by fully empowering front-line engineers can resource allocation serve the identification and solution of technical problems in practice more effectively, and promote the formation of context-based knowledge. Third, enterprises need to develop a learning organization with high integration, and encourage collectivism and collaboration to the maximum extent in the core system and incentive mechanism. This helps promote collective learning and enables enterprises to effectively acquire and apply context-based knowledge. This article develops the theory of multinational corporations and the theory of complex product system, and provides inspiration for improving technological capabilities of enterprises through R&D-oriented corporate governance, and building a technological innovation system with enterprises as the main body, markets as the guidance and deep integration of industry, research and application.