STREAM 2: CyberFocus - Cyber Impact for the North West

The CyberFocus project has been co-designed to galvanise the North West (NW) cyber ecosystem by forging trusted interconnections that instil confidence in research-led impact partnerships to propel national prosperity and protection. The project is led by Lancaster University in collaboration with six regional HEI partners, three of which are NCSC recognised Academic Centres of Excellence in Cyber Security Research, to generate impact from a relevant research portfolio of £75.4M over the last 5 years.

It is a critical time for NW with the arrival of GCHQ in Manchester and National Cyber Force (NCF) in Lancashire which creates unprecedented opportunity to maximise the socio-economic potential of a high growth, innovative sector central to the UKs response to increasing geopolitical uncertainty.

The NW cyber ecosystem has been independently assessed and found to have:

~300 unique cyber security companies present (largest cluster outside London/SE): 23% are large, 12% medium, 24% small, and 41% micro.
54% of cluster businesses are cyber security focused and the remainder 'diversified', offering wider products or services.
~12,000 FTEs currently working in cyber security generating £760M in annual GVA.
A high level of absorptive capacity as evidenced by the NW region's position as 2nd to London and the South East in raising external cyber investment,
The project has been co-created to unlock the estimated potential regional growth to 30,000 FTEs and c.£2.7Bn GVA by 2035. Civic partners are central to the project's success and have been woven into the project's fabric from inception. Their close project engagement ensures regional aspirations are met and impact generation is regionally "sticky" whilst in line with regional values and culture.

Project co-design workshops included representation from UKRI, civic, government and industrial partners. They identified the distinct opportunity for cross-cluster collaboration given how well positioned the cyber ecosystem is to other regional specialisms in aerospace, defence, nuclear, and manufacturing. They further highlighted the regional opportunity to generate innovative cyber products in collaboration with the region's high quality research institutions. However, the workshops identified the key challenges of; risk aversion within the cyber supply chain to innovation adoption that could lead to cyber security failures, innovation demand signalling difficultly due to the secrecy around cyber, highly competitive skills and talent pipelines for cyber and innovation expertise, which is compounded by a lack of cross sectoral collaboration.

The CyberFocus project embodies the co-created approaches to catalyse the existing impact and innovation culture and realise collective regional cyber aspirations, resulting in enthusiastic support from 18 civic, government and industrial partners with £877k of in-kind match funding The project is structured around five work packages that will:

Identify regional innovation Challenges and Impediment to adoption,
Facilitate Trusted, Confident Impact Partnerships,
Enhance Regional Cyber Capacity and Capability,
Develop Regional Innovation Skills and Knowledge, and
Foster Cyber Public Engagement and Policy Impact.
The project anticipates significant socio-economic impacts, including job creation, economic growth, and increased national and global awareness by achieve the following outcomes:

Elevating Cyber Supply Chain Trust and Confidence,
Growing Sustainable Cyber and Innovation Expertise,
Enhancing Cross Cluster Coordination and Interconnections.
CyberFocus provides a timely opportunity to deliver a common, strategic focus in support of regional aspirations, and generate a wide range of impacts at a scale not previously possible through previous and current projects. Without CyberFocus, the socio-economic potential from strategic government levelling-up investments may go unrealised.