innovation Archives | McKeon Group

Integrating the new generation of construction talent into a third generation firm

Posted on 15/06/202115/06/2021 by Gemma Kerley

Digital Transformation in Construction: Bringing all the team along

2020 was a big year for the McKeon Group team as we celebrated 70 years in business https://mckeon.ie/mckeon-group-celebrates-70-years-in-the-industry/. Originally established by Tom McKeon back in 1950, McKeon Construction started life as one man and his van. From making bricks to crafting his own hand tools, Tom was an innovator whose work ethic and values are reflected in the company he founded, seven decades on.

Over the past 70 years, McKeon Group has grown into a third generation, multi-million euro construction contractor in the education, residential and commercial sectors. In 2011, the mechanical division was founded and McKeon Group was formed. By that time, McKeon Construction had already developed a technology and electrical division and was well positioned to extend the services available to clients, with a focus on innovation. In fact, last year McKeon Group was approved as a registered training provider with Engineers Ireland, offering an exciting and thought-provoking CPD ‘Innovate Together’ to clients and colleagues across the construction industry. You can find more information about this CPD offering here: https://mckeon.ie/new-cpd-innovate-together/

The early adoption of emerging technologies for the industry has played a huge role in the successful scaling of the business. Speaking to construction technology provider Pipedrive recently, Sales & Marketing Director Paul McKenna explained “Our USP is the completion of complex projects in live environments. With that end-to-end technical skillset of a construction division, mechanical services, electrical services, there’s a minor works team, and the technology division is a separate company now called Hereworks—automation, smart buildings and more”.

Of course, digital transformation in any industry is about so much more than technology – its ultimate success always comes down to people. The most important asset of our business is the people, many of whom have been with us for decades. As the construction industry finds itself in the midst of a digital transformation (or revolution?) that has been massively accelerated as a result of Covid-19, the McKeon Group team is driving this transformation. With newly-qualified graduates working on projects alongside more established team members, we know first-hand the importance of being a progressive workplace that fosters a culture of shared learning and cooperation.

Culture is central to successful transformation

A digitally-focused company empowers the team to deliver faster and attracts the right talent from multiple disciplines. A truly successful digital culture, however, requires a workplace where everybody is open to innovation (even if they don’t agree on the methodologies!) and is ready to embrace the future. 70 years on and though much has changed for McKeon, the fundamentals remain true – a company is only as good as its people. A study by the Boston Consulting Group found that of 40 digital transformations, companies that focussed on a culture of collaboration were five times more successful than those that focused on other priorities. Integrating a new generation of talent is therefore vital to the long-term success of a forward-looking organisation.

Embracing Change

Central to the embracing of changing digital culture is demonstrating the value of new technology that can potentially transform how projects are undertaken. For example, data is already being used in construction to identify behaviour patterns amongst building teams to pinpoint pain points and possibly automate repetitive tasks. This sort of information requires interdisciplinary collaboration from the ground level up to gather machine-readable information and then convey the findings back to relevant teams. By allowing people with differing perspectives and differing levels of experience to collaborate on specific projects from the ground level up, entire companies learn to work together and embrace the benefits of transformation. Similarly, virtual and augmented reality is another exciting area of change for construction managers and site teams, who can observe projects remotely or visualize project changes on the fly. Immersive technologies for the built environment came into their own over the pandemic and they are crucial to the future of construction, however, its adoption on site depends entirely on a digital culture being fully embraced by everyone in the team.

A culture of learning

While the construction industry has historically had a less-than-stellar reputation for the uptake of digitalization, in the post-covid landscape the time is now right for integrating technology at a deep company level. We know from experience over the past number of decades that innovation is achieved through a collaborative attitude, with shared learning at its heart. Therefore, all team members have a vital role to play in digital transformation as they are in a position to identify gaps in digital skills and identify opportunities for new and established employees to work together. In our experience, age or the number of years in the industry is not an accurate indicator of a person’s openness to new technologies, this invariably comes back to an individual having a growth mindset. Fortunately, a growth mindset is one of the characteristics we value most when recruiting new people to join our team!

Team-led collaboration encourages knowledge sharing in the workplace and builds confidence in trialling emerging technologies to a greater extent than management-led dictats. But a culture of learning isn’t simply something that is undertaken for a while and then overlooked. We understand that success and team satisfaction ultimately depends on a workplace encouraging the continuous sharing of ideas and knowledge from all team members.

Bringing the whole team along

The most important thing is to not leave anyone behind. While the future is most certainly digital, the established ways of doing things are still something that the next generation can learn from and integrate into a workplace culture going forward. Over the last 15 months, we have found that remote gatherings of employees can be a great way to encourage this workplace culture of collaboration and connectivity. By having all team members come together and share ideas everyone gets to share perspectives and feel comfortable learning from each other. The one positive side effect of such an unprecedented crisis as that faced by the entire industry since March 2020, is that it calls for unprecedented solutions. Not all teams are comfortable with this, whereas at McKeon Group, innovation is in our DNA – quite literally.

About McKeon Group

Established in 1950 and ISO certified for more than two decades, McKeon Group offers expert construction, fitout and building services. The family-run Group delivers projects, services and maintenance across a range of sectors for State, local authority, FDI and private clients. For more information, contact: www.mckeon.ie

McKeon Group Innovation Partner Fergal Brophy on South East Radio

Posted on 04/09/202004/09/2020 by Gemma Kerley

Earlier this week innovation consultant Fergal Brophy, who works closely with McKeon Group, joined Karl Fitzpatrick on South East Radio to talk about the importance of innovation and how “repurposing” a business can create new revenue streams.

McKeon Group’s new CPD offering, Innovate Together, was developed by the McKeon team and Hereworks, working closely with Fergal Brophy, who is an Entrepreneurial Specialist at UCD Innovation Academy. Fergal also lectures on Innovation Principles & Applications at the Institute of Public Administration (IPA) and is lead facilitator for the Innovation Pillar on Enterprise Ireland’s Go Global 4 Growth programme.

The Innovate Together problem-solving collaborative sessions enable participants to apply key creativity and innovation concepts to real world engineering problems and opportunities. Delivered online or in-person, each CPD offered is tailored to a specific audience and based around key themes, agreed upon in advance. These sessions demonstrate the use of Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Business Model Innovation to frame a specific problem or opportunity and to open participants up to new ways of collaborating to co-create innovative solutions.

While the Innovate Together session has been certified for CPD points by Engineers Ireland, it is not exclusively for engineers. In fact, as a new approach to problem-solving, Design Thinking is not industry specific. It can be tailored to any organisation, within any sector or industry and there can be different themes.

*You can find out more about ‘Innovate Together’ and contact the McKeon Group team here: https://mckeon.ie/new-cpd-innovate-together/

About McKeon Group

Established in 1950, this year marks the 70th anniversary of McKeon Group, which remains a family business. ISO certified for more than two decades, McKeon Group offers expert construction, fitout and building services. The Group delivers projects, services and maintenance across a range of sectors for State, local authority, FDI and private clients. McKeon.ie

McKeon Group: Teaching, Learning & Measuring Innovation

Posted on 31/07/202031/07/2020 by Gemma Kerley

Last month we were delighted to announce that McKeon Group has been approved as a registered training provider with Engineers Ireland. We are now in a position to offer our exciting and thought provoking CPD ‘Innovate Together’ to our large range of clients and colleagues in the construction industry. This live online or in-person, problem-solving, collaborative experience enables participants to apply key creativity and innovation concepts to real world engineering problems and opportunities. Each CPD offered shall be tailored to a specific audience based around the key themes of Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Business Model Innovation to frame a specific problem or opportunity in the given engineering domain or area of interest. You can find more information about this CPD offering here: https://mckeon.ie/new-cpd-innovate-together/

When it comes to industry innovation, we firmly believe that the culture of innovation does not belong to startups or newly-established organisations. As a third generation business, McKeon Group thrives on innovation, but it is not something that we take for granted. We value innovation and, perhaps more importantly, we adequately resource it. And now, we teach it and we measure how successful it can be.

So when Blade Kotelly published an article titled ‘Innovation Can Be Taught. And Measured’ (link to the full article here:
https://www.cmswire.com/leadership/innovation-can-be-taught-and-measured/amp/), it caught our attention.

The author starts by acknowledging that:

“As a culture, we’re in love with the idea of genius. We point to people like Steve Jobs and Edison and think: They must be born with it. That type of innovation can’t be taught…”

There is no denying that thinking differently comes naturally to some, but every person has the ability to be more innovative. In the above article, Kotelly describes innovation as a baseline requirement for survival for many industries today and he does not accept the premise that innovation cannot be measured. While he acknowledges that highly innovative individuals and teams tend to share certain capabilities and innate behaviours, he believes that these capabilities and behaviours can “most certainly” be taught, learned and measured.

In his article above, Kotelly, outlines five things business leaders need to be aware of as they drive innovation within their organisations:

1. Innovation Is Not Creativity

These are terms that are routinely – and incorrectly – used interchangeably. There is an important distinction between innovation and creativity, and this distinction becomes even more apparent in a team and/or enterprise setting. Of the two, creativity is more innate, whereas innovation, according to Kotelly, is about harnessing a set of tools that enable the discovery of new ideas with the intention of getting the highest possible value out of both the ideas and the ideators.

2. Intellect and Emotions Matter

There is a direct link between how emotionally open a person is and their ability to problem-solve in an innovative way. Kotelly explains that while we have all learned to react to stimuli differently, people who have a calmer reaction to problems are more likely to see them as opportunities for innovation and to take action. He goes further to say that if you learn to do this at work when a problem arises, you will likely be in a much better position to innovate.

3. Innovation Requires Both Invention and Advocacy

This is perhaps the most obvious, yet overlooked consideration. Kotelly points out that new ideas alone are not enough to spur innovation; teams and individuals must be also able to promote and advocate for those ideas.

4. Bad Habits Can Be Overcome

This is arguably the most interesting consideration for organisation leaders. Kotelly states that innovation is often a matter of how a person adapts to different situations, which is something that can be taught – even to leaders and employees who have not demonstrated particularly innovative behaviours in the past.

5. Different Teams Need Different Levels of Innovation

This is a tricky one. Innovative organisations advocate for innovation across the entire organisation, however, the reality is that different functions and departments will likely require different levels of innovation. Kotelly makes the excellent point that everyone within the organisation needs a basic understanding of innovation to ensure that they do not squash innovation by accident.

It is definitely worth reading Kotelly’s article in full: https://www.cmswire.com/leadership/innovation-can-be-taught-and-measured/amp/. And if you wish to discuss innovation in the context of Ireland’s construction and real estate sectors, talk to the team at McKeon Group about bespoke, CPD accredited, innovation sessions for your organisation.

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