This week the CyberFocus team brought together their first cohort of CyberFocus-funded projects for their inaugural Grant Holder Workshop at Lancaster Castle.

The day focused on a central question: How do our funded projects collectively connect, strengthen, and accelerate the North West cyber ecosystem?

Across the day, project leads worked together to map the place-based impact of their work across the region, exploring how individual projects, when viewed as a collective, can help build greater capability, stronger connections, and longer-term resilience across the North West cyber ecosystem.

For many, this was the first time coming together as a cohort, building new connections, and beginning to see their projects as part of something bigger, a growing CyberFocus community helping shape the future of cyber innovation across the North West, together.

And it felt very fitting to end the day with a tour of Lancaster Castle, a place deeply shaped by history, identity, and region. A reminder that place is never neutral; it shapes how communities form, how connections are built, how innovation happens, and how it translates into lasting impact. This is what sits at the heart of our EPSRC-funded CyberFocus Place-Based Impact Acceleration Account.

Contributions from the CyberFocus team - Dr Jude Towers for organising the day, Maysaa Elhabbash for sharing CyberFocus' approach to impact monitoring and evaluation, Dr Anna Dyson on the importance and place of this first cohort in CyberFocus, and Security Lancaster Co-Director Prof. Daniel Prince for his insights on place-based innovation and the wider ecosystem vision behind CyberFocus.