An Tánaiste Leo Varadkar has launched the Enterprise Ireland "Built To Innovate" aid campaign that will see Irish construction companies offered aid packages for modern housing construction.

The scheme, which is part of the Government's Housing For All plan, will see companies offered assistance where they pursue enhanced usage and implementation of Modern Methods of Construction, implement Lean training in both manufacturing and onsite environments, improve the use of digital tools that can bring productivity benefits and seek funding for research concepts or process innovation ideas.

In order to be eligible for supports businesses must be Irish companies with a minimum of 10 full time employees and be construction services and manufacturing companies that have a minimum of 20% of revenue derived from home building.

A suite of lean, digitalisation and research & innovation grant aid packages are now available for projects where the impact will result in homes that are built faster, on time and with less expense.

The "Built To Innovate" Lean Offer is designed to encourage the adoption of Lean principles in your organisation to increase performance and competitiveness.

A Lean project can provide the framework for a Digitalisation journey for a company, using Lean to map out and measure processes can enable the automation of repetitive tasks, thereby freeing up and equipping staff to work on value-adding activities.

The Digital Offer is about redesigning a business to serve customers better, starting with a deep understanding of customer needs and value stream and then using new technology to improve the customer experience.

While the Research & Innovation supports provide access to Enterprise Ireland's expertise and contacts to increase the levels and value of R&D and innovation in your company. 

Speaking at the launch Mr Varadkar said "This campaign is a small part of the solution. We are now making available grants and training programmes, which would usually only be for export-focused companies, to our domestic home-building sector. We hope this will help reduce some of the cost of residential construction and ensure that quality and sustainability are embedded in the design and construction processes of all new homes."

Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Darragh O'Brien added: "Reducing construction costs is critical to increasing supply. Recent analysis shows that the cost of materials is increasing and that there is continuing demand for construction skills. Productivity in construction needs to improve to address this imbalance and we need to look to innovation in areas such as modern methods of construction."

The "Built To Innovate" campaign will run for six weeks from 21 March across print and digital channels, especially in the construction sector.