I've Arrived!

I have finally arrived in China and managed to get my internet set up! The journey here was pretty tiring - 24 hours, 2 flights and 1 potential donkey burger as my main meal (?!). Everything is so different here. On my first day, I asked to have broadband access in my room and the sheer amount of red tape that had to be navigated was pretty daunting. At any UK university, you’d just find the right wireless network!

Almost all of these issues have been down to the language barrier. The area that I am visiting is a rapidly developing city with a huge manufacturing industry, but tourism here is practically non-existent so barely anyone speaks English. In similar places that I have visited, even if you don’t speak much of the local language you can try out some words or use gestures to communicate. The Chinese language is poles apart from anything spoken in Europe though, and gestures here often have entirely different meanings to those in the UK. And it is surprisingly difficult to act out “I need some mosquito repellent”!

Needless to say, the importance of really understanding a country’s cultural expectations and means of communication before attempting to expand a new product or business there has become pretty obvious to me! In a few days time, I will be visiting the factory of Linuo Paradigma, a joint German-Chinese company which manufactures solar panels. Hopefully, this will give me some idea of how previous companies have approached this in the past to become successful enterprises, invaluable advice to pass on to Innovate Product Design clients. I’ll write again after that.