Bringing Environmental Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Tags to Market

The Innovation Fellow will analyse the development and deployment of environmentally friendly RFID tags and nanobarcodes in large-scale consumer retailing in the UK and the USA. RFID tags are already used in a number of business sectors to provide a tracking system identifying items through the supply chain. The total RFID market was estimated to be worth US$11.0 Billion in 2018, and is expected to increase to US$13.4 Billion by 2022. The potential employment effects of this technology have not been extensively investigated. RFID tags significantly reduce inventory count time from hundreds to a handful of hours with implications for staffing needs in different parts of the supply chain. The innovative contribution of the research is to examine the learning process from product development to implementation and its impact on labour productivity and decisions for managers about their labour requirements.

The Innovation Fellow, based at the ESRC funded Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Digit), will work in close collaboration with a Sussex based company, Advanced Material Development (AMD) (www.advmat.co.uk). AMD are developing these tags with the Material Physics Group at the University of Sussex led by Professor Alan Dalton and supported by Professor Peter Krüger's Quantum Systems and Devices group. These groups are part of the Sussex Programme in Quantum Research (SPQR) and the Data Intensive Science Centre in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Since 2016, the Materials Physics Group have developed a platform technology based on graphene (and related material) inks which can be used for a variety of applications as functional materials. A novel quantum magnetic microscope pioneered by the Quantum Systems and Devices group provides crucial characterisation of conductivity and current flow in these materials and devices based on them. In 2017 a new company called Advanced Materials Development (AMD) was founded, based on Sussex IP, to commercialise these inks and develop a range of applications in further partnership with end users. Sustained industry engagement with key strategic partners in the consumer, automotive, and chemical sectors, including government organisations, is leading to a wider awareness and adoption of this novel environmentally friendly technology.

Research questions: contributing to creating a zero-waste business and employment effects
Of particular interest, the inks have been developed as coatings for replacement of metals in RFID systems for a leading UK retailer (M&S) and US RFID leader (Avery Denison) - a development that could have far-reaching environmental benefits and very large markets. This has been driven by the launch of Marks & Spencer new roadmap for its Plan A sustainability programme, which includes targets to reduce emissions by 80% and turn the company into a zero-waste business. The developed antennas are competitive with the incumbent technology in both performance and cost; AMD are currently negotiating to supply graphene-based antenna for early 2020.

The problem being examined by the Innovation Fellow will be to understand how these RFID tags can contribute to creating a zero-waste business and its implications for the organisation of work. This problem will be examined around three core questions:
1. How does the company AMD commercialise the innovative environmentally friendly patents being developed by the Material Physics Group at Sussex?
2. What obstacles and opportunities do large-scale retailers face in seeking to adopt and implement new environmentally friendly technologies?
3. What are the consequences of these technologies for the organisation of employment in retail?

A mixed methods Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach will be used to address these questions. The PAR approach aims to enable action learning and is based on the premise that research participants should be actively involved in the research process.

The business need, stakeholder engagement and impact is embedded in this proposal by the close links between the Material Physics and Quantum Groups at Sussex University and the firm AMD who are commercialising these technological innovations. In addition, the trials being run with M&S dovetail with the research being conducted at the Digit centre on the implications of new digital technologies for transforming working practices in the same organisation. The Innovation Fellowship would provide a significant contribution in bringing these different streams of knowledge together to sharpen our understanding of digital innovations and their effects on management staffing decisions.

The retail sector is one of the core sectors examined in the longitudinal sector cases studies in the Digit research programme. The retail sector has seen some of the most spectacular changes driven by disruptive technologies and changing consumer patterns. These factors have had a profound effect on the location of employment in this sector with jobs moving from the high street to warehouses and new delivery channels. Tracking devices have become key to these new business models. The Innovation Fellow would examine existing and future practices in the development of more environmentally friendly tags as part of supply chain management systems. The combined use of these kinds of technology is likely to have significant effects on the organisation of work in this sector as illustrated by the experiment with Amazon Go shops in the US. The implementation of these tags is being trialled by AMD in the UK with Marks and Spencer in 2020. In addition, there is potential to examine how tags are being used at Walmart in the US, as they have offered to host three Digit research interns to work at their US offices in the summer of 2020.

An Innovation Fellowship on this topic would provide a very significant interdisciplinary contribution to enhance the existing ESRC investment in the Digit centre contributing to analysis of the scientific, environmental, managerial and employment consequences of the development of these digital technologies.

The impact of this knowledge exchange will be generated through
1. Consultative discussions with the key stakeholders on the progress of trials at M&S (UK)
2. Embedded participative research with AMD and Material Physics Labs over a period of two years
3. Embedded research internships with Walmart, USA over the summer of 2020 and 2021
4. A series of research working papers published on the Digit centre website (www.digit-research.org) (launched in January 2020).
5. Contribution to modules at the Digit summer school in 2021
6. Contributions to the development of an MSc in Business and People Analytics at the University of Sussex Business School being led by Professor Nachiappan Subramanian.
7. Supporting the Innovation Fellow with ECRs capacity building through a programme of training activities organised through the Digit Mid and Early Career Researchers Forum.