Study of the structure of the working day in the Chief Engineer service of an industrial company

The heart of any innovative ecosystem is people who due to their motivation and skills are able to create something new. However, numerous studies and statistics characterizing the results of innovation reveal low level of its activity. The authors of the article reject the hypothesis of opportunistic behavior of the subjects of innovation as the main reason of their low innovative performance and focus their attention on the system organizational and managerial barriers hindering the intellectual labor productivity and, in particular, on the lack of time for experts to solve innovative problems. The study focuses on the specialists of the Chief Engineer service who ensure the implementation of the technical policy of industrial organizations. The article has aims to present the results of personalized analysis of time consumption of the engineers of one of the chief engineer services (Chief Technologist Department). The data obtained makes it possible to identify organizational and managerial barriers of producing technological innovation and formulate recommendations on overcoming them in terms of digital transformation. The authors have collected, analyzed and systematized the data on engineers’ working time consumption. They have also established the disproportionality of routine and innovative component of the engineers’ labor, suggested options for improving proportions at the basis of point and system scenarios for redistribution of the working time consumption that requires solving organizational issues of strategic character. The article focuses the attention on the fact that engineers need to be allocated certain time to form competencies to create and transfer new technology into production divisions, to absorb technological knowledge, prepare industrial organization to accept new technology. As the example of a system scenario implementation the authors adduce creation of the sectoral engineering centre.