A cyber-security project supporting businesses across Staffordshire has won a Gold Award at the 2026 EFMD Excellence in Practice Awards.

The award recognises the Staffordshire Cyber Resilience Programme, a collaboration between Keele Business School, the North Staffordshire Chamber of Commerce and Hixon Group, created to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) tackle growing cyber-security threats.

The EFMD Excellence in Practice Awards recognise outstanding learning and development partnerships between organisations. Only four business schools globally received a Gold Award in 2026, underlining the international significance of the project.

Dr Colin Rigby, Director of Business Engagement at Keele University, said: "Our model transforms the classroom into a high-stakes R&D lab.

"By operationalising student intellectual labour to address SME vulnerabilities, we fulfil our civic mission of impactful scholarship.

"This is not just training - it is a sustainable virtuous cycle between academia and regional economic development."

SMEs are widely recognised as the backbone of the global economy but often lack the resources and expertise needed to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyber-security threats.

In response, the project group developed a "triple-helix" partnership to deliver an evidence-based response to this challenge, strengthened by Hixon Group's co-location within the Business School.

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The resulting programme was designed not as a traditional training course, but as an ecosystem-based intervention with a strong student-led development pathway.

Jonathan Lawton, Owner, Hixon Group, said: "Partnering with Keele Business School has been transformative. Co-location allowed us to turn real-time threat intelligence into student-led innovation, helping thousands of SMEs achieve a 60 per cent reduction in cyber-risk.

"This 'living lab' model is a global blueprint for regional resilience."

The programme included a free online cyber-security training platform and diagnostic suite, which reached more than 5,000 users within six months.

Training was also embedded into core Chamber services and University curriculum activity to support long-term sustainability.

Alongside this, the partnership developed a funded Large Language Model (LLM) Natural-Language Reporting System to improve access to complex cyber-risk data for organisations with limited specialist expertise.

Geoff Beadle, Economic Development Officer, Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council, said: "Investing the Shared Prosperity Fund into this partnership delivered an incredible return for our local economy.

"Beyond avoided losses, the project's regional 'heat-map' data is now actively shaping our borough's Digital Strategy."

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The programme has already delivered measurable impact. In its first quarter alone, it reached 2,000 individuals, increased multi-factor authentication usage among participants by 73 per cent, reduced reported cyber-risk incidents by nearly 60 per cent, and secured £5,000 in innovation funding.

The initiative is now being recognised as a transferable blueprint for successful university, industry and chamber collaboration in supporting regional economic development and business resilience.

Chris Plant, Deputy CEO, North Staffordshire Chamber of Commerce, said: "For our business community, this initiative turned an unintelligible threat into a manageable task.

"By embedding the 'Digital Fortress' into our core services, we leveraged institutional trust to dismantle the 'embarrassment barrier'. It is a gold-standard membership benefit delivering real-world protection."

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