Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

It is almost impossible to ignore the profusion of information currently in the media regarding environmental issues. In particular, with the recent announcements from leading retailers declaring their commitment to becoming carbon neutral, consumers' awareness of these issues is continuing to grow. However, to what extent do they understand the science behind these claims and are they able to access an easy-to-understand and balanced source of information to answer their queries? It is increasingly being recognised that the application of green chemistry will be fundamental to the production of environmentally friendly products that have both the confidence and trust of consumers. The emergence of green chemistry has been one of the most significant developments in the chemical sciences in recent years. However the awareness and understanding of green chemistry amongst the general public is limited, and it is commonly perceived that chemistry is the cause of environmental problems rather than the solution. This lack of confidence in chemicals could be at least in part attributed to current concerns highlighted in the press and pressure from NGOs, and can only be resolved through directly engaging with consumers and connecting them with chemicals in a positive way. The Green Chemistry Centre at the University of York in partnership with Boots the Chemists, At-Bristol and Glasgow Science Centre, seek to address this issue through the creation and delivery of a hands-on and informative display using touch screen technology to explore products consumers typically use daily e.g. shower gel, moisturiser, toothpaste etc. By entering a virtual bathroom and selecting one of these products, the visitor will experience a series of multiple-choice picture-based and animated questions tailored to uncover what the product is made from, how it is made, how it works and what happens after we use it, and will incorporate the steps that can be taken to improve their sustainability through the application of green chemistry. The display will be hosted at both At-Bristol and Glasgow Science Centre, and will be designed to appeal to both adults and children. Through this activity the project team aim to engage the public and get them thinking about the environmental implications of the products they enjoy as part of everyday life and promote a positive connection between green chemistry and consumer products.

This project will explore the largely unknown international history of British healthcare and beauty, using Boots the Chemists, Britain's most recognised chain pharmacist, as the central case study. The project spans the period from 1919, when the company posted its first sales agent overseas, to the streamlining of its divisions in 1980. It examines how Boots established itself as a prospector, retailer and manufacturer overseas, but also how it continually absorbed international influences as part of its home marketing strategies. Drawing on Boots' vast, underexplored archive (c.5,000 boxes of approximately 500,000 items), this project bridges medical, social, cultural, business, colonial and transnational history. The project team are not interested in writing a classic business biography of Boots' success and growth, rather they are interested in exploring what the Boots story reveals about the international dynamics of the British health and beauty industries. The central research question asks: How does Boots' international archive allow us to map the global networks that moulded and sustained British experiences of healthcare and beauty both at home and abroad? To answer this, thematically focused work packages will recreate the life-cycles of key products within six product domains (pain management, personal hygiene, surgical supplies, vitamins, perfumes, and skincare) across local, national and international spaces. These six focal areas have been selected because of their ample archival resources and their potential to illustrate how complex imperial and other global networks of materials, knowledge and people underpinned the development of British healthcare and beauty, both at home and overseas. This pioneering research will appear in leading academic journals across the historical humanities and in a co-authored book. It will advance early career capacity by employing a full-time postdoctoral researcher, and provide additional opportunities for an already funded M4C doctoral student. Three interdisciplinary academic workshops will explore new perspectives on the internationalisation of the UK beauty and healthcare industries and will open the project to colleagues in geography, pharmacy, medicine, literature and linguistics. The project team will showcase findings via an easily navigable website featuring information about the project, links to relevant resources and quarterly updated project stories, attractively illustrated with archival images. Some of these stories will be authored by the project team and some by 'citizen researchers'. These contributors will be identified through call outs via social media, Boots newsletters, and the local press, and might be local history enthusiasts, former Boots employees or business people reflecting on historical context. Additional outreach will include two pieces of popular history, a high-profile public exhibition, with a touring component and accompanying public talks, timed to coincide with Boots' 175th anniversary in 2024. A further outreach strategy targets professional archivists via three initiatives i) working with Boots Archive staff to help inform their cataloguing and digitisation strategies; ii) holding three innovative 'Archive Roadshows' where team members visit other significant business archives (Unilever, Marks and Spencer, John Lewis) to reflect on the usefulness and accessibility of their resources; iii) hosting an Archive Study Day to bring together company archivists throughout the UK. Finally, team members will work with Nottinghamshire County Council to run two 'Knowledge Labs' to consider how this research might stimulate creative thinking about current issues facing the UK high street. Sessions will discuss not only how local growth is internationally informed, but also how international markets are heavily influenced by smaller local developments.

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

The NEO-DEM project will use non-standard data and novel methods to impact business efficiency, encourage community collaboration and provide scholarly insights into consumer behaviour. UK businesses can struggle in the developing world, despite excellent track records at home. The following reasons explain a good deal of this failure in retail, service and consumer oriented sectors: * It is not possible to directly transfer domestic business models into emerging economies due to cultural, infrastructural and behavioural differences. Companies need to generate new analytical and strategic models that identify the differing needs of customers based on an understanding of the novel behavioural and consumption patterns exhibited. * In the developed world consumer oriented businesses are increasingly data-driven. They rely on cross-referenced geo-demographic, socio-graphic, and psychographic data as well as transactional data (e.g. Tesco & Boots in the UK); their use is enmeshed within company strategy. In many countries this kind of data are incomplete or non-existent, their absence inhibits growth and means that targeting and resource use is sub-optimal. Replicating the kind of data that is readily available in the UK will often be impossible or expensive and impractical. Even when transactional data is forthcoming (e.g. Tesco Clubcard Malaysia) there is limited scope to cross-reference them with reliable geo-demographic data-sets and models that are taken for granted in the UK (e.g. Experian's Mosaic). Despite lagging behind in infrastructural developments, developing countries have experienced digital revolutions; providing a largely untapped opportunity to generate business intelligence. In 2010 of the 5 billion mobile phones in the world 80% were in developing countries and this proportion is continues to grow. African countries have embraced new financial technologies such as mobile payment: over 17m Kenyans use mobile money; around 25% of the country's GNP flows in this way. Crowd sourcing systems such as Ushahidi lead the way in the aggregation of social factors. The project will create a decision support and market segmentation platform generated via personal data, collaborative aggregation and crowd-sourced feedback, that will allow the generation new models of consumer behaviour to support innovation. Our work will hinge on three case studies in exemplar developing economies (Tanzania, Malaysia and China) where we will develop example behavioural segmentations via novel computational and clustering methods and in partnership with a range of data providers and internationally significant companies including: Alliance Boots, Dairy Farm International, Bakhresa Group, Boots, E-fulusi, Tesco, Marks & Spencer and Experian. Academic research into consumer behaviour patterns will be significantly advanced by the techniques developed, their application in this field is novel. There is scope to exploit advanced forms of computation and clustering that more readily account for market complexities. There is a very high chance that the project will provide insights into consumer behaviour that have hitherto remained obscure. So the contribution to research in this area could be both methodological and empirical and contextual (robust insights into developing world consumers are more rare). This expeditionary collaboration is likely to open the door to and on-going conversation between the fields of business/consumer analytics and computational analysis.