At Harbert: Research
Greg Jenkins Ingwersen Professor of Accounting School of Accountancy
Eric Negangard Assistant Professor School of Accountancy
Counting the Uncountable
S ay, you make cell phones. You’re mining over 60 different elements, putting together tens of thousands of inputs to make thousands of parts which are built by hundreds of suppliers and sub-suppliers. And once the hardware is together, there’s the software and the testing, and the packaging and shipping across the globe to hundreds of millions of customers. In 2023, Apple alone sold 235 million phones. The complexity and volume of the product, the convolution and size of the value chain are staggering. And that value chain doesn’t end when the product is in the hand of the customer. It doesn’t really end until the product has outlived its life and been broken down and recycled. Whether you are a manager or investor, how do you glean useful insights when a business and its products have this level of complexity? What if you could have a granular view of every aspect of a phone’s components from the first gram of aluminum mined to the last bit of copper and lithium recycled? And what if you could have that view for each of the phones you sold (all 235 million of them) in real time?
Some Auburn researchers have figured it out, and not only have they published some ground- breaking research, they’ve received a provisional patent to legally protect their invention. Two Auburn professors Greg Jenkins, Ingwersen Professor of Accounting, and Eric Negangard, Assistant Professor, have collaborated with Mark Sheldon, Associate Professor of Accounting at John Carroll University, to develop a potential solution to the tracking and reporting of products with an innovative combination of technologies — blockchain, non- fungible tokens (NFTs) and smart contracts. The technical particulars can get deep. But blockchain creates a distributed, secure ledger that’s private, unless permission has been granted. Companies have no fear of sharing information. An NFT can represent a unique digital or physical item — a component part and its related greenhouse gas emissions, for example —that can exist on this ledger. Now all details can be accounted for. And a smart contract, a software script, can automatically
create an NFT (think a marker for a component part and the related emissions), merge an NFT into a group of similar NFTs (think summarizing parts and emissions across firms in the value chain), destroy an NFT (once we’ve summed a company’s component parts and emissions into our own),or hold that NFT in escrow if we want to exchange items. According to the researchers, “This system creates a near real- time cradle-to-grave provenance for tangible assets and their associated components as they move through the value chain and allows each and every component to be counted and traced. Furthermore, all value chain participants can use this system to determine effectiveness and efficiency of their own individual role.” Applause is warranted. HM Learn more about this impactful research by listening to the podcast at aub.ie/emissionstracking
Harbert Magazine, Spring 2025 11
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