Privacy Notice
This notice explains how your personal data is handled when you engage with VentureVersity — whether by attending a Mixer event, submitting an application, or contacting the programme team.
Data controller
VentureVersity is delivered by Loughborough University as part of Forging Ahead, a Research England-funded initiative. Loughborough University is the data controller for the personal data described on this page.
For Loughborough University's full institutional privacy policy — including your rights as a data subject, how to make a complaint, retention periods that apply generally across the University, and contact details for the University's Data Protection Officer — please see:
The information below is specific to VentureVersity and should be read alongside the University's main policy, not instead of it.
What information we collect
Depending on how you engage with VentureVersity, we may collect:
- Contact details — your name, email address, university, department, and role, when you register for a Mixer event or submit an application.
- Application content — your responses to the VentureVersity application form, which is deliberately designed to ask what your research or project can do, not how it works technically. You are guided throughout the form to avoid disclosing unpublished technical detail, proprietary methods, or anything that could affect future intellectual property protection.
- Event attendance — registration and check-in records for Mixer events and Showcase events.
- Communication history — a record of emails or messages exchanged with the VentureVersity team, including outreach communications if you've been contacted about the programme.
Why we collect it
We use this information to administer the VentureVersity programme: to process and assess applications, organise and run events, communicate with participants, share relevant information with your university's Commercialisation Team, and report on programme outcomes to Research England as our funder. Aggregated, non-identifying figures may also be used to report on programme reach and performance.
How your application is reviewed
If you submit an application, a member of the VentureVersity team reviews it first. Identifying details and anything inappropriate for further analysis are removed before any further review takes place. This sanitised version may then be assessed using a secure process to produce a market and opportunity analysis ("Fire Test"); inputs used in this process are not used to train any underlying AI model. Your university's Commercialisation Team is kept informed of the outcome alongside you.
The content of your application — what you actually wrote — is not transferred to or stored in any other system beyond this review and analysis process. We only ever record the fact that you made a submission, separately from what you submitted, for the purposes described below.
Sharing with third-party tools
We draw a clear line between two types of information, and treat them differently.
Your application content — what you actually write in response to the application questions, describing your research or project — is never shared with or entered into any third-party CRM, marketing, or automation platform. It stays within the application portal and the human review and analysis process described above. The only system that holds this content is the one you submitted it to.
Your contact and engagement details — your name, email address, university, and a record that you registered for an event or submitted an application (not what you submitted) — may be held in third-party software used by the University under contract and on its instruction. These include customer relationship management (CRM) software to track engagement with the programme, email and LinkedIn outreach software to communicate with prospective applicants, event registration and management platforms to handle Mixer and Showcase sign-ups, and workflow automation tools that connect these systems together. This is typically entered manually by the VentureVersity team, sometimes after a delay, specifically so that application content and contact records are never merged or transferred automatically between systems.
These providers only process your data on our behalf and in line with our instructions — they do not use it for their own independent purposes, and in the case of application content, they do not receive it at all. Where a provider is based outside the UK or European Economic Area, we only use providers that offer an appropriate legal safeguard for that transfer, in line with UK data protection law.
How long we keep your information
Application and programme participation records are generally retained for the duration of the VentureVersity programme and for a period afterwards to meet our funder reporting obligations to Research England, after which they are deleted or anonymised in line with the University's standard retention schedules. If you'd like to know the specific retention period that applies to your information, please get in touch using the contact details below.
Your rights and how to contact us
You have the right to ask what personal data we hold about you, to ask us to correct it, and in some circumstances to ask us to delete it or restrict how we use it. For all data protection queries relating to VentureVersity, please contact Loughborough University's Data Protection Officer via the contact details published at lboro.ac.uk/privacy. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) if you believe your data has not been handled correctly.
Changes to this notice
We may update this notice from time to time as the programme evolves. The version published here is always the current one.
Last updated: 22 June 2026