Keele Business School cybersecurity partnership wins international award

A cybersecurity training programme developed by Keele Business School and a business based at the university, has won international recognition at a global awards ceremony.

The Staffordshire Cyber Resilience Programme was developed in partnership between Dr Colin Rigby and Hixon Group, a specialist IT support company which is based at Keele Business School , and was designed to develop a rapid, evidence-based framework to help SMEs respond to live economic threats.

Now the project has received international acclaim, with the team behind it winning a Gold EFMD Excellence in Practice (EiP) Award which Dr Rigby and Jonathan Lawton, Director of Hixon Group, accepted at a ceremony held in Dublin.

Keele was one of only four business schools globally to receive a Gold Award in 2026, underlining the project's international significance.

The Programme was developed after Hixon Group detected a surge in successful ransomware deployments against local micro-businesses in 2024, saying that the disparity between cyber-risk and organisational readiness in Staffordshire had reached a tipping point.

SMEs faced sophisticated threats without the financial resources or technical literacy to defend themselves. Analysis of the local business ecosystem found a significant lack of coordinated accessible cyber support, leaving firms at risk.

In response, a "triple helix" partnership was formed between Keele Business School (KBS), Hixon Group, and Staffordshire Chamber of Commerce, to develop a rapid, evidence-based framework for responding to live economic threats.

The resulting intervention, the Staffordshire Cyber Resilience Programme, reached 2,000 individuals in its first quarter, driving a 73% increase in multi-factor authentication usage among participants, reduced reported cyber risk incidents by nearly 60%, and securing £5,000 in dedicated innovation funding.

100% of the organisations who participated have also reported implementing at least three new security controls following the training, and economic modelling (based on the average costs of cyber-incidents on UK small businesses) estimates that the intervention has helped businesses save over £300,000 in potential losses within the first year.

The training has also delivered a cultural shift, helping staff and business leaders to feel more aware and take more of an active role in protecting their organisations' cyber security. There was also a marked increase in the voluntary reporting of "near-miss" incidents, which confirms that the "embarrassment barrier", or the fear of looking incompetent, had been successfully breached.

Dr Rigby said: "Our model transforms the classroom into a high-stakes R&D lab. By operationalising student intellectual insight to address SME vulnerabilities, we fulfil our civic mission of impactful scholarship. This isn't just training-it's a sustainable virtuous cycle between academia and regional economic development."

Jonathan Lawton, Owner of Hixon Group, added: "Partnering with Keele Business School has been transformative. Co-location allowed us to turn real-time threat intelligence into student-led innovation, and we've helped thousands of SMEs achieve a 60% reduction in cyber-risk. This 'living lab' model is a global blueprint for regional resilience."