Tag Archives: advisors

Appointments, News

Chris Dunning-Walton welcomed to Six Degrees’ advisory team

Six Degrees welcomes Chris Dunning-Walton to its advisory team, as the company strikes new ground in the cyber security landscape.

Six Degrees has appointed Chris Dunning-Walton to its advisory team. Chris joined the Six Degrees advisory team on 1st January 2023.

​​Chris is currently CEO and Managing Partner of Sentients, a boutique international executive search firm that focuses on placing Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and other cyber leaders with FTSE 250 enterprises. He is also CEO of InfoSec People Ltd, a multi-award-winning cyber security recruitment consultancy, and the founder and director of CyNam, the UK’s largest Cyber Cluster focused on cyber tech industry development, innovation, and inclusive talent enablement in Cheltenham and Gloucestershire.
Chris has worked with a number of premier brands including Admiral Insurance, Dixons, Carphone Warehouse, Aviva, The Economist, Vitality, BAE, BT Deloitte, and KPMG.

Chris said: “Cyber threats present as the world’s top business risk. It’s important that businesses develop strategies that not only seek to improve their cyber security postures, but also their cyber resilience: how technology and processes enable the business to respond when incidents arise. What drew me towards Six Degrees was their exceptional people and portfolio of services, fronted by expertise in hybrid cloud technology and with security at the core of everything they do. I am excited to be working closely with the leadership team of a great business which is committed to enabling its clients to not only survive – but to thrive in these complex times.”

Commenting on the appointment, Six Degrees CEO Simon Crawley-Trice said: “With the economic outlook we’re facing over the next few years, it’s more imperative than ever that companies transform their digital strategies to be reliable, resilient and cost-effective. Security must be at the heart of any transformation. Chris has years of experience working with top FTSE brands, helping them to better understand the challenges before them, to mature their cyber strategies, and to secure a return on their cyber security investments. Chris is the right person to work with us as we strive to connect our clients with the solutions needed to protect and grow their businesses.”

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We help customers enjoy all the game-changing potential of cloud. We create secure, flexible platforms that set organisations free to achieve and exceed their boldest aspirations, whatever those may be.
Our industry-leading security protects against today’s and tomorrow’s cyber threats, while our unrivalled technology stack means maximum productivity and efficiency, even with a remote workforce.
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News

Only 20% of businesses on Government entrepreneurship schemes reach their first growth milestone

Only 20% of businesses on Government entrepreneurship schemes achieve any growth milestones, according to new research by emlyon business school.

The study, conducted by Greg Croidieu, an associate professor in entrepreneurship and innovation at emlyon, alongside colleagues from Aalto University School of Business, Babson College, and Economic Development Collaborative, investigated whether innovative businesses ventures achieved growth outcomes from government programs and found that growth is less than likely.

The researchers conducted three sets of analyses on data from the Small Business Development Centre in Southern California addressing biases, unobserved factors, and using different measures of growth. The analysis was on over 1,700 business, from sectors ranging from technology to manufacturing.

The research found that in most cases, public support programs lack sufficient resources and they often misallocate resources away from clients who need it the most.

The findings also show that innovative ventures are not guaranteed to grow more than other ventures, unless support is targeted directly for them.

If additional government support is explicitly targeted at innovative ventures, they have more opportunity to receive in-depth advice, learn from experts, and translate this into productive growth outcomes., as long as the participants are willing to learn and the correct treatment design is used.

The researchers observed that treatment design is more crucial than selection for innovative firms to achieve growth but selection ensures the right participants are chosen.
“The research determined that for innovative ventures to achieve more growth milestones, they need sufficient advising support. This depends first on having the formal criteria used to allocate support, therefore innovativeness must be included as part of the criteria to ensure these ventures receive sufficient support,” says Professor Croidieu.

The study highlights that policymakers play a vital role in allocating resources to promote innovative entrepreneurship as a means of spurring economic growth in regions.

This research can be applied to other specific sectors, as long as those sectors are explicitly included in any formal criteria used to allocate support, to ensure businesses are recruited correctly and matched with qualified advisors.

This research was published in the journal Research Policy: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S004873332030130X?via%3Dihub