The Xmas break is over and we are back to the first proper working week of the New Year. Time is flying already as my thoughts turn to the plans for the next twelve months and beyond. The subject occupying most of my thoughts is my old friend innovation. To be honest it is a subject that has never been far from my mind over the last six years, ever since getting involved in CyberNorth.
My premise is simple: for the North East to be a leading light in cyber security we need more innovation.
Reality is a bit more difficult, however. Innovation may be hard to spell or even to say for some people but it’s even harder to implement as a policy. Innovation is not something that is straightforward, it takes place in many, if not most organisations, with little tweaks here and there on almost a daily basis. What we more commonly mean by the word though is more dramatic, the introduction either in a disruptive product/service or the coming together of existing products/services to deliver something new.
Innovation therefore involves existing organisations working on new opportunities, people working in these businesses thinking they could do better or to solve perennial problems as well as those in academia undertaking research and pushing back the opportunities from the latest technology. It takes risk, those prepared to take the risk in developing new products/services and, just as importantly, those prepared to buy them.
To increase the amount of innovation in cyber security across the region requires a hybrid approach, bringing all parties together, thinkers, risk takers and consumers. We need to work hard to get businesses to think about what innovation is, how it works and how they can do more of it. We need to bring academia and business together to work in collaboration and we need to draw in potential consumers with real world problems and a sense of what they will pay for and not.
Above all though, we need new entrants into the market and this is why I am excited at the prospect of the new CyberNorth Innovation Centre that I and my colleagues are working on right now. By itself, the centre won’t make the region innovative but it will certainly help.
Watch this space.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 