'CAPRI' aims to contribute to retail innovation by helping to fill the gap between technology development and retail successful implementations. We believe that among the main issues that slow down the process of retail innovation, there is the difficulty of predicting how certain technologies will impact the consumers' experience and, as a consequence, how the related investments will affect revenues. Indeed, even though the unrelenting diffusion of Internet connectivity and smartphones adoption is undoubtedly transforming the consumer-retailer relationship by empowering consumers' rationality, both scientific research and retail practice provide extensive evidence as to the major role played by emotions, experience and engagement on consumer's preferences, choices and even technology adoption. The retail brand, its target audience, as well as the physical and virtual contexts where both shopping and its experience take place, all have critical influence on the impact that a certain innovation strategy might have on the consumers' perceptions and, finally, sales. Retail is context-specific and retail innovation should be informed by an in-depth contextualized knowledge of consumers. At the same time, big data and consumer analytics represent an important potential for retailers but without theories to explain the observed patterns of relationships and to inform related queries, this potential will remain unexploited. Mobile technologies provide the novel opportunity to gather and merge big data on socio-demographics, shopping behaviors, spatial movements, individual differences and even real-time data on emotions and experience. Consumer research usually conducted on small sample sizes, in laboratory settings, and with self-report questionnaires collected far from both the time and the context of consumption is likely to be transformed by the mobile and big data revolution. This research project will provide a first contribution for the integration of different types and sources of consumer data while testing the impact of mobile technology on the consumer experience, and it has the ultimate goal of establishing a new code of practice of 'research and development' for retail innovation. Our work will extend on previous literature on various levels: (1) it will improve the understanding of experience by examining the relative impact of individual differences, socio-demographics, motivation, emotions; (2) it will show the role of experience and its predictors on technology acceptance and satisfaction; (3) it will show the impact of technologies on the consumer experience and provide indications for a consumer-centered-contextualized approach to technology design and implementation; 4) It will advance consumer behaviour models by adding spatial movements data. We will develop a longitudinal system for the real time gathering and integration of consumer data within the retail space. The system will be based on the management of a 'mobile and location-based' panel of consumers that will be both an innovative source of primary data and at the same time a future test bed for the experimentation of novel concepts and technologies for consumer experience strategies, location based communication, mobile-based consumer research. The project will involve the development of mobile apps and the recruiting of panel participants based on state of the art statistical representation of the client base of Sainsbury's. A first study will be carried out for the test of a mobile application and the integration of 'attitudes and behaviours' with 'real-time consumers' experience and feelings' with 'spatial movements' with 'personality and individual differences' and 'socio-demographics'. This first study will provide the basis for further methodological and technological developments with the aim of advancing consumer analytic applications based on context-specific strategies of the retail partner.

The buildings we live in, work in, and shop in all contribute to the UK's carbon emissions. In fact, they account for more than 40% of the total national emissions. These emissions can be divided between operational and embodied emissions. The operational emissions are those related to running the building (e.g. heating, lighting) whereas the embodied emissions are those occurred in every activity necessary to extract and manufacture the raw materials, transport them on site, and assemble and maintain them up to the end of life disposal. Embodied carbon emissions have a peculiar characteristic: once they have been emitted in the atmosphere there is no way back. Any intervention, even if beneficial in the future, instantly provokes an increase of the embodied carbon. This is why embodied carbon is so important: we need to reduce embodied emissions now or we simply will not be able to do it in the future. The majority of the embodied emissions in buildings are often related to the building structure. This is because the structure generally takes up most of the building's total mass, and it is often made of materials that require a lot of energy (and therefore emit a lot of carbon) to be produced. It is therefore imperative to measure correctly the embodied carbon of building structures, in order to understand where the opportunities for carbon mitigation are and how to access the untapped reduction potential. The project will seek to answer the following questions: I. How do different materials affect the whole life carbon emissions of building structures? II. What are the whole life carbon emissions of building structures for different building types in the UK? This project will establish how different structural materials affect the whole life carbon emissions of building structures through rigorous numerical assessments across the main building types in the UK (i.e. residential, non-domestic). This shall move us away from the current 'sentimental' discourse over how green a material is to allow to choose the material with the lowest environmental impact over a building's life cycle for the specific project at hand. The aim is not therefore to promote one material over the others but rather to allow for informed decisions based on comparable assessments of the different materials by looking at the correct comparative unit, i.e. the building structure within a given building type. The project will collect primary data from industry where no robust information is available on the carbon emissions of the different materials across their whole life cycle, and will adopt stochastic modelling and uncertainty analysis to produce probability distributions of the likely carbon emissions. This will contribute to superseding the current deterministic mind-set, which results in single-value assessments that are of very little use. The findings will be published as guidance to architects and designers, planners and policy-makers, and in the professional press, as well as in academic papers.