Innovation and Engagement Facilitator

We are looking for an Innovation and Engagement Facilitator to join the CyberFocus team at Lancaster University. This is an outward-facing role working at the intersection of academia, industry and regional innovation. You will build relationships across the North West cyber community, work with researchers, businesses and civic partners to identify opportunities for collaboration, and support the projects and partnerships we fund to develop their potential and maximise their impact.

Do you enjoy making connections between people, ideas and opportunities – and helping those connections develop into something meaningful? Perhaps you have worked with businesses and researchers and understand that effective collaborations rarely begin with a perfectly formed project. More often, they start with a good conversation: understanding what someone is trying to achieve, recognising where another person, organisation or piece of research might help, and staying involved as that initial connection develops.

This role is therefore as much about building relationships as it is about identifying opportunities. You will need to be comfortable starting conversations with new people, asking thoughtful questions, understanding different perspectives and building the trust needed to move collaborations forward.

What you will be doing:

Your work will span the full range of CyberFocus engagement activity. You will work with cyber businesses to understand their challenges and connect them with relevant research expertise, bring academics and industry partners together to develop new collaborations, maintain active relationships with our funded projects to support their progress and identify further opportunities, and plan and facilitate workshops that bring different stakeholders together around shared challenges.

As part of the CyberFocus team, you will:

- Develop and maintain relationships with businesses, researchers and other partners across the regional cyber ecosystem, creating opportunities for people to connect and collaborate.

- Support collaborative projects from their early stages through delivery, staying engaged with the people involved and helping maintain momentum.

- Listen carefully to stakeholder needs and use what you learn to identify useful connections, opportunities for further engagement and potential follow-on activity.

- Plan and, following training in our approach, facilitate workshops, innovation catalysts, sandpits and other collaborative activities involving academic, industry and civic partners.

- Work with the outputs from workshops and projects, helping to analyse what we are learning, identify important themes and contribute to reports, evaluation and impact activity.

- Work across the wider CyberFocus partnership to ensure engagement activity supports the programme's objectives and creates meaningful value for the organisations and people involved.

About you:

You may already work in knowledge exchange, research impact, collaborative programmes or another role that involves connecting organisations and people. Equally, your current job title may be quite different. We are more interested in the capabilities and experience you bring than whether you have previously held an identical role.

What will matter is that you are comfortable going out and building relationships rather than waiting for those relationships to come to you. You will be able to establish credibility with different kinds of people, listen carefully to what matters to them and maintain relationships after the first conversation. You should be interested in what makes collaborations work and willing to follow opportunities through as they develop.

You will also be intellectually curious. You do not need to be a cyber security expert, but you will need a genuine understanding of and interest in cyber security and innovation, and a willingness to continue developing your knowledge. You should be comfortable engaging with researchers, asking good questions about complex or unfamiliar subjects and translating across different perspectives.

Because our engagement activity also generates evidence and insight, you will need to be confident working with information as well as people. You should be able to take material from workshops, conversations and projects, identify what is significant, and contribute to clear analysis and written outputs.

You will be educated to Master's level or have equivalent relevant professional experience, and you will need to be willing and able to travel to meetings and events across the region.

If you recognise yourself in the way this role works, even if your career so far has crossed several different sectors or types of organisation, we would be very interested in hearing from you.

This is a full-time, fixed-term position until 16 March 2029 and is fully externally funded.