Interview with Hollie Wakefield, General Manager of CyNam.

15 July 2024, I took our university placement student, Nathan Fowler (LinkedIn), with me to Cheltenham to visit the Hub8 MX Innovation Centre and to interview some key people. We ended up with four pieces of content, which was a fantastic return.

Got there and back without needing to charge my car this time, but day time driving and not having the two horrendous detours certainly helped.

This blog post contains an interview with Hollie Wakefield, the General Manager for CyNam.

Executive Summary

My real high level points that I took from the interview.

• Funding and partnerships are key in being able to provide the supporting services for free
• Events over different topics helps bring people together, and from outside of the community
• Making connections to other innovation clusters is vital in scaling up
• The team is in and amongst the other tenants

This is taken from the CyNam website:

The primary aim for CyNam (Cyber Cheltenham) is to help create the conditions for local cyber technology innovation. We provide the capability, community and culture to help set small companies on the path towards becoming ‘unicorns’. We see CyNam as orchestrators – bringing together pioneering start-ups with investment, industry and government for wealth creation in the Gloucestershire region.

Who are CyNam and how do they fit in with Hub8?

CyNam themselves are a tenant of the Hub8 MX innovation centre and as such can maintain a very close relationship to the cyber businesses locally. Hub8 provides the space and facilities, whilst CyNam develops the community in an unofficial partnership.

What does innovation mean to you?

Hollie says innovation is when people from all backgrounds come together to create novel secure technologies, when it comes to the cyber security sector.

CyNam create the platform to bring people together, which creates opportunities, innovation and growth as a result of human connectedness.

What supporting role do events play?

Events are key to bringing people from the cluster and guests from outside together. The range of event topics can be very wide and their last one was based on Space, whilst other events have included Agri-Tech and other niche topics. Their headline event brings 300 to 400 people, from industry, academia and government come together to explore hard hitting topics.

Hollie mentioned that their next event is in Cambridge and the reason why a Gloucestershire based organization is going to be there is because they have a programme called Connecting Clusters. This looks at technology hotspots with the aim of bringing them together too, to leverage their capabilities and bring new opportunities for all.

This echoes what Mike Sewart, CTO of QinectiQ, said in his interview about needing situational awareness between innovation centres and what each other are doing.

How important are partnerships?

CyNam members get access to free events, mentoring support, networking opportunities, all backed by sponsors and grant funding from the likes of Barclays Eagle Labs.

The partnership with the University of Gloucestershire has been key in CyNam achieving their goals.