Confidentiality & Privacy

Business Confidentiality

• Information about your business and your challenge will only be used to work on your project, which is to devise a response to that challenge.
• All collected data, including communications with your project team, is treated as confidential.
• Your business is free to use any project-specific material generated in collaboration with your team. This includes the Challenge Scope and the Response Plan.
• Research data will be stored on the University’s OneDrive, Qualtrics, and email systems and only accessed via password-protected computers.
• Business confidential and identifying information will be replaced with labels (such as Supplier01, Client02, Strategy03, and System04) for reporting, discussions with supervisors, analyses, publications, and archiving.
• At the end of this project, your business will receive a summary of the research findings. This summary will not contain any identifiable or business confidential information.
• Archived data may be used for future research but never for commercial purposes. Your business and individual participants will not be identifiable from this archived data.
• Your business, the University, and the consultant-researcher will not make claims on each other’s respective intellectual properties.

Individual Participant Privacy

• Individual contact details will only be used to communicate with your team members during the project. Individuals will not be contacted about any matter unrelated to this PhD project.
• Information that identifies individuals will only be stored until the project is complete. At the end of this project, all personal contact details will be deleted.
• Individual identities will be replaced with labels (such as Participant01, Client02, Expert03, and Supplier04) for reporting, discussions with supervisors, analyses, publications, and archiving.
• The business and its managers will not have access to any of the collected raw data.
• Recordings will be made to augment the consultant-researcher’s notetaking during meetings and interviews. Recordings will be used to generate interview transcripts. When the consultant-researcher has made sufficient notes and participants have confirmed their transcripts, recordings will be deleted. Recordings will not be published or archived.
• Interview recordings will be transcribed using the Otter.ai service. This is a service trusted by large institutions and has robust security and privacy policies in place (https://otter.ai/privacy-security). Recordings and transcripts will be removed from Otter.ai as soon as transcriptions are complete.