Innovation in national security is focus for spotlight speech at annual government event

HMGCC CEO George Williamson was among the spotlight speakers at the Home Office’s recent Security and Policing event held in Farnborough. 

The event, staged at the Farnborough International Exhibition and Conference Centre, attracted thousands of visitors from across the technology sector, government and policing. 

We hosted a stand and took part in two events on the agenda: one a presentation led jointly with Dstl, and the other a speech presented by our CEO. 

George’s speech, entitled, ‘how national security is working with the world’s best innovators’, gave an insight into why there is now a focus on working more extensively to source innovation from industry and academia. 

As part of this, he referred to the trailblazing work carried out by our HMGCC Co-Creation initiative (run in partnership with Dstl), which works to publish tech challenges via a network of collaborators on platforms such as social media and websites. 

In a joint presentation at the event, HMGCC and Dstl also gave an update to this work in a session entitled, ‘Partnership in action: Solving defence and security problems.’ 

George went on to describe how efforts to work with external bodies are being taken even further – and why this is important. 

He said: “Co-Creation has been a brilliant first step. It has taught us much. Through our engagement over the past year with young companies, investors and our existing primes, we’ve been gaining insights about how we can go further. We have been thinking hard about what our offer to industry and academia is, recognising that the national security community has an important role to play in creating the conditions for innovators in companies great and small to succeed.” 

He continued: “At HMGCC we understand in detail the part that technology plays in national security work, and we have an established facility at Hanslope to engineer and test products that will work in all types of environments and situations. So, for companies wishing to work more with national security – we can offer support with prototypes and product assurance. 

 “We have the expertise to support industry and, at Hanslope Park, we also, importantly, have the facilities - a large campus of buildings with world-class technology and cutting-edge equipment. Our newest building, for example, is a power sources centre of excellence responsible for a raft of complex work in the growing field of batteries and other sources of power. This already includes a collaboration area to host work with external bodies, such as the universities who work with us on research projects.  

“Whilst our day-to-day focus is on enabling national security work at the sharp end, we recognise that we are also a useful entry point to technology requirements across the national security and defence community. 

 “Our emerging offer brings together a clearly communicated set of engineering/technology problems, access to funded contracts, engineering and product design support, as well as the ability to bring alongside trusted, public, and private capital providers.”   

HMGCC’s external work already includes: sandpit projects carried out with universities; the separate release of cyber security problem sets; and the funding of some academic research projects. Increased external work will also prove a future focus.