Niall Murphy is co-founder and chief executive of EVRYTHNG an Internet of Things software company which manages digital identity data in a smart products cloud. Think of humans having their own individual digital identity online via LinkedIn or Instagram and apply this to some of the four trillion consumer goods produced annually and one can see that there might be a demand for a system which allows real-time identification of products throughout their entire life cycles.

Founded in 2011, with Diageo becoming the company’s first customer in 2012, EVRYTHNG’s technology is used by companies such as fashion brand Ralph Lauren, seafood behemoth Mowi and Coca Cola to enhance trackability, confirm product authenticity, enhance brand protection, analyse consumer attitudes and add value to consumer experience and engagement by using the likes of QR codes, NFC and RFID technology.

Murphy was born in Belfast and has family in Donegal and Enniskillen. He left Ireland as a small child and was brought up in South Africa. “I guess I have an entrepreneurial streak and maybe a bit of a rebellious streak in the background,” he says over video chat from his home in Switzerland where he is an avid mountaineer. 

As an interviewee he is generous with his time – running over despite having an online conference call to lead with the World Economic Forum where he is a member of the forum’s Global Innovator’s community.  EVRYTHNG is working on a program with the WEF to help to address the problem of interruption to the supply of essential goods such as food or medicine particularly an issue in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.

His aunt Inez McCormack was the renowned human rights campaigner, trade union leader and first female regional secretary of UNISON. McCormack served as the first female president of ICTU and had a pivotal role in the Good Friday Agreement. Her raison d’etre was tackling inequality and supporting marginalised groups – specifically women and those living in deprivation. Murphy’s father Terry is an entrepreneur and publisher who started out as an advertising salesman for the Belfast Telegraph in Dublin before being sent to South Africa by a Canadian publishing firm. 

Murphy is a computer scientist by training and says that he was “privileged in many ways” to be at university in South Africa at a formative time in history. “I started there in 1988 when South Africa was still under the apartheid regime,” says Murphy. “During my studies the regime collapsed, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the negotiation process went on.

“I did ICT policy for the African National Congress leading up to 1994 when the democratic government was elected and I did a whole lot of bizarre things like helping South Africa rejoin the International Telecommunication Union. At the time, South Africa didn’t have the internet so we had to negotiate IP addresses for the country. That is really when my entrepreneurial career began.” 

In the early Nineties, Murphy says that he was exposed to a lot of future thinking and co-founded an organisation called The Digital Thinking Network that used scenario planning as a way of formulating potential futures and identifying innovation. “About once a decade I like to try to identify what I call ‘inevitable futures’ and then work out what should be invested in in that inevitable future,” he says. 

In 2000, Murphy became interested in the potential of mobile internet and decided to focus on wifi technology. He co-founded The Cloud which became the largest operator of public wifi in Europe. The business was sold to BSkyB in 2011. 

“A techy geek”

A pattern can be seen in how Murphy works – as a computer scientist and self-confessed “techy geek” he looks at the opportunities in evolving technologies and then thinks backwards to some degree. But as an entrepreneur, he also looks for what he calls the “rational irrational”, meaning that “there is a big enough gain in accomplishing something that if we go back five or six years would have been relatively high risk”. Hence his investment in the Internet of Things and in developing a system which creates a digital identity for consumer goods.

“When we talk about IoT people tend to think about connected fridges or cars but what it’s really about is being able to track information about physical objects,” he says.

“I heard Bruce Sterling back in 2007 at the SXSW festival ask: ‘Why can’t I Google my shoes?’ and that is a great way of encapsulating what IoT is. We can go to Google Maps and we can see the street or the building but we can’t see the stuff that’s in the building and if those things were connected to the web you would be able to see that. If we end up with all things connected to the web there are huge opportunities for efficiencies, business operations, better information for consumers, better sustainability…” 

Because most large brands do not make, store, distribute or retail their own products EVRYTHNG provides an opportunity for these brands to find out more about what’s happening with their products. As Murphy simply puts it: “Knowing where their things are, who’s got them and what they are doing with them” – questions which are not always easy for large manufacturers to answer. 

Then there’s the ability for brands to find out more about their customers, particularly as direct to consumer selling grows in popularity via online. This is important because the customer is becoming more discerning. Not only is there a growing cohort of consumers who are demanding more from the brands they buy from, but there is also a growing opt-out culture whereby previously loyal customers are opting out of relationships with brands whose principles (or lack thereof) they are no longer aligned with. Murphy says that it is no longer simply about gaining market share but about losing market position if brands cannot substantiate their trustability to customers. 

Giving away personal information about ourselves on Instagram no longer seems strange to most people and the idea that brands are collating data about us no longer seems extraordinary. But will we be bothered if a product we engage with is sending real time information about our use of that product back to the brand? Murphy believes in a world in which we quite happily scan a barcode with our phones to gain more information about a product, we’ve moved beyond that point but says that trust is still important to customers who are “discerning in who they think they can trust and who they can’t”.

“Privacy elements are real considerations but I don’t think it’s any different to people’s engagement through social media or any other digital channel. There is a lot of importance for brands to be able to explain how they are responsible for using the data they are acquiring but you can be incredibly specific about the value of why somebody is engaging and what they are getting in exchange for that because it is an intimate communication between the individual and the brand that is high value whether that is reordering something or applying for a warranty – product engagement is generally part of the digital landscape. Brands have got to walk a line to prove that they are trustable, that’s not talked a lot about, but clearly we have seen major data breach problems and those brands have suffered tremendously.”

The importance of trust

Trust is clearly something that is becoming more important to the consumer and EVRYTHNG’s platform provides an opportunity for brands to communicate more insight to their customers around subjects such as provenance or authenticity. Mowi is one example of a food company using EVRYTHNG’s technology to inform their business but also to speak to their health- and origin-conscious customers.  If Ralph Lauren and Puma use the technology to track their product, guarantee authenticity and speak to their customers, then sustainable fashion apparel brand Another Tomorrow uses it to track each step of the development of their clothing products and to be able to communicate their transparency to their customers.

Broadening out the idea of sustainability, Murphy believes that greater knowledge of a product throughout its life cycle may provide an opportunity to “expand the service opportunity” around a product through the resale or rental market – think reselling a designer item and being able to easily confirm that it’s the genuine article, or, being able to turn a product into a service because you can track it. 

“Digital presence for inanimate objects offers two major areas of value creation – the opportunity to know more about the item and hence enhance its utility or value, but perhaps more importantly, the ability to track the item across its lifecycle – both from its initial production to the consumer but also in its ongoing reuse, recycle or resell existence,” says Murphy. “Trackability has a profound effect on the business model of how we purchase, own and use objects.” 

Murphy seems to have a genuine sense that connecting products to the web will result in a smarter, more sustainable world and says that this sense of purpose and mission is important to the motivation of the team at EVRYTHNG. Core values include “committed to audacious goals”, “cracking the code” and “best as a team” reflecting the view that “the team can embrace uncertainty and ambiguity in pursuing objectives if they apply thorough thinking and leverage their collective capabilities”. 

“I believe there is always a way forward, and that open, creative thinking applied with an honest assessment of the situation are important principles,” says Murphy. “I believe our adaptability has been important as we have adjusted to the evolving market and technology circumstances, while at the same time keeping our eyes on a consistent goal and objective – the route to accomplishing the vision may need to be adapted as you learn, but holding to purpose is critical.” 

As Covid-19 has wreaked havoc on the consumer product industry system at both the demand and supply end, Murphy says that his company can provide the data intelligence in real time that businesses need to deal with these challenges. “Supply chains have been super-optimised for cost efficiency, but have proven to be very brittle with many companies finding themselves in dysfunction as the supply of raw materials, distribution hubs, facilities and labour resources have become unavailable in unpredictable patterns,” he says. 

“Indeed the machine learning algorithms used to optimise a lot of distribution processes are no longer fit for purpose as the data set used to train them is no longer reflective of the new operating environment.  At the same time consumer behaviour and sales channels have shifted, with ecommerce purchase dramatically increased, new delivery and collection models and the like.”

Murphy also says that in the current crisis, dysfunction and disruption in the global supply system is having major humanitarian effects where there are impediments to getting essential goods – including food and medical supplies – to those in need. “Lack of end to end visibility caused by fragmentation of information across the world’s supply systems is a major problem,” he says. “EVRYTHNG is working in collaboration with industry partners and the World Economic Forum on a program to help to address this problem by bringing together disparate supply system information sources in a pre-competitive and neutral way and thereby improve visibility so that those seeking or supplying essential goods can get ahead of the problems.” 

So will there ever come a time when an apple is no longer merely a piece of fruit but a conduit for information? 

“Absolutely,” says Murphy.  “Consumers may want to know where a piece of fruit came from to have confidence in the sustainability of their purchase behaviour. Suppliers or service providers can always provide a better service or experience if they know more about how and when people want to consume products or services. Tracking dietary intake is increasingly becoming a part of our lives, and may become linked to our health care services just as exercise tracking is today.”