Business Transformation through Blockchain

Digitalization is a trend that has heavily impacted the tourism industry. Horwath HTL (2015), the world’s largest hospitality consulting brand, points out that technological (r)evolution and digital channels belong to the mega trends in tourism which will influence mid- and long-term tourism development. The World Economic Forum (WEF) (2017, p. 3) states in its report on digital transformation in the aviation, travel, and tourism industry that “there is widespread recognition among industry leaders that the role of digital technology is rapidly shifting, from being a driver of marginal efficiency to an enabler of fundamental innovation and disruption”. The WEF details recent industry trends, such as a growing demand for travel, the rise of the digital consumer, changes to the security landscape, and technological trends such as the rise of intelligent automation and the dominance of digital platforms. As a side note, the term “blockchain” is mentioned only once in their 40-page report as a potential enabler for the safe and secure exchange of personal data.

The digitization of the energy industry continues to pick up speed. A new driver of this rapid development is currently the blockchain technology, which could, according to many experts, usher in the next stage of development of the Internet. Blockchains have the potential to optimize energy management processes in almost all stages of the value chain while coping with the rising complexity of the increasingly decentralized energy system.

We can perceive the advent of smart living spaces attributed to the fast emerging of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. By combining with the blockchain technology, many innovative business models can be brought into reality. This chapter examines the state of the art and design issues of IoT and the blockchain integration from software architecture perspective. In particular, four typical architectural styles for such systems are presented and discussed. The presented architectural styles are useful for helping developers make appropriate design decisions.

With the emergence of Internet platforms in the manufacturing domain, new implications have evolved for existing businesses which force them to find new business areas or adapt their products and services in order to create added value. Furthermore, generic platforms build on these domain specific platforms to offer services across business areas, which creates additional disruption potential. Manufacturing companies need to decide if they are to develop their own platform in order to connect machines on the shop floor to the internet or to other domains. Some of the requirements that appear for such platforms in the Internet of Things are explained in this chapter. Based on these requirements, technology classifications are thus designed.

The technology of Distributed Ledger will offer new opportunities to replace existing components at all levels of industrial IT architecture. Therefore, platforms can be reshaped by using a different technology portfolio, which acts as a counterpoint to the defined technology classifications of platforms. The Industrial Internet Reference Architecture is used to illustrate the described comparison of technology portfolios.

This chapter presents a blockchain-based solution to ensure secure and convenient sharing of personal health data. With the advent of mobile and wearable technology and rising concerns about potential privacy issues and vulnerabilities in current personal health data storage and sharing systems, there is a desire for a trusted information sharing framework to ensure security and privacy of personal health data. We present a permissioned blockchain and Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) empowered user-centric health data sharing solution. The blockchain-based design involves anchoring the operations on records on the blockchain network, preserves the integrity of the health data and provides proof of integrity and validation permanently retrievable from cloud database. The privacy is ensured through leveraging Intel SGX’s capabilities. We present in detail how the integrated blockchain and SGX platform can ensure integrity and privacy of health data. We demonstrate how through a Web application for personal health data management (PHDM) systems, the individuals are capable of synchronizing sensor data from wearable devices with online account and controlling data access from any third parties. The protected personal health data and data access records are hashed and anchored to a permanent but secure ledger with platform dependency, ensuring data integrity and accountability. We provide results that indicate our approach provides user privacy and accountability with acceptable overhead. We discuss scalability issues and present a tree-based data processing and batching method can handle large datasets.

Globalization has brought much progress and better standards of living to many people and countries. Our societies and economies are much more interconnected than any previous time in history. These networks are much harder to control than in the past; the unrestricted operation of a globalized industry has created a series of ecological and social crises. How should we tackle this web of interdependent complex crises and address some of the fundamental challenges humanity faces? The sustainability challenges we are witnessing are rooted in a misaligned incentive system that does not take into account the ecological and human capital which the economic system depends upon and needs for its very existence. We propose to modify the economic system itself by systematically including externalities and making them tradable on markets. Using insights from complexity science, we propose a new system which would motivate people to act more sustainably, while remaining decentralized, self-organizing, multi-layered, and circular. With the advent of recent breakthroughs in blockchain technology, but also the “Internet of Things”, and artificial intelligence, it is possible to create such decentralized incentive systems. We describe the core concepts and processes of such a design, discuss some architectural consideration, and conclude by exploring challenging and beneficial implications of its implementation.

The emergence of blockchain technology entails myriad implications for actors across a diverse set of industry sectors. Focusing on the blockchain as the data structure underlying cryptocurrencies, this chapter explores the potential of this technology to contribute to the broader societal goals of inter- and intra-generational equity commonly convened under the banner of sustainability. In particular, we examine how cryptocurrencies may alleviate a fundamental institutional driver for economic growth and facilitate the maintenance of a sustainable steady-state economy by displacing demand for debt-based money as a medium of exchange. In building this case, the chapter begins by considering the inexorable limits to economic growth implied by the bio-physical realities of our planet, and the inability of our current monetary systems to function effectively within these limits. The discussion then turns to the ways in which political reforms and alternative currencies could overcome this problem, before exploring the various advantages of cryptocurrencies over many of the alternative options. This line of argumentation amounts to a strong case for the further development of blockchain technologies and especially cryptocurrencies, and one which may appeal to individuals far beyond the spheres of IT, business, and finance.

This chapter explores the contributions that blockchain may offer to the societal challenges of realising sustainable development and a circular economy. More specifically, we address the question on how blockchain can be used to develop a hybrid, transactional values-system using multiple values (e.g., electricity, mobility, assets, etc.) simultaneously between various actors. We do so by conceptually exploring the concept of circularity and sustainability in addition to typifying the characteristics of blockchain technology. To frame this exploration, we first specify three distinct, yet coherent levels of development: accounting, contractual, and community. Each of these levels will be illustrated by examples. Next, we confront these developmental levels of blockchain with three levels of societal challenges, namely (i) servitisation and dematerialisation, (ii) life-cycle extension, and (iii) recycling, conversion, and substitution. Confronting blockchain levels with the levels of societal challenges leads to a possible conceptualisation of the application of blockchain technology in relationship to the societal challenges. In conclusion, we state that this debate is still in its infancy and that we have only superficially investigated this intriguing issue.

This chapter examines the legal and technical implications of the application of blockchain technology to authenticate and verify identity for e-Government services and transactions.

Blockchain, the distributed ledger technology that sustains cryptocurrencies, continues to develop as a valuable alternative for financial inclusion, considering that its successful implementation would depend on the entrepreneur’s ability to grasp contextual practices currently present in the reality of the unbanked. Lack of trust, reported as one of the main non-monetary barriers to financial inclusion, poses specific challenges to blockchain entrepreneurship, in that the meaning of trust appears to depend on context, and blockchain’s supposedly advantageous characteristics turn out to be insufficient when considering contextual sensitivities. In this chapter, we elaborate on the role and meaning of trust in the context of the unbanked in comparison to blockchain’s decentralized approach to trust, directing the blockchain practitioner to understand the informal practices of the unbanked as a much-needed factor for the creation of trust; practitioners are invited to adopt a sociotechnical approach to blockchain entrepreneurship. Finally, we exemplify this perspective by analyzing the cases of a qualitative phenomenological research, based on a sample of unbanked individuals working and interacting in a wealthy Mexican neighborhood. With this analysis, we hope to contribute to the design of more efficacious blockchain-based business models for financial inclusion.

Blockchain, as a distributed data structure ensuring trust and establishing consensus among participants that do not know and potentially do not trust each other, is expected to change businesses in many different areas. One of these areas is the legal industry. How blockchain can potentially disrupt the legal industry is in the focus of this chapter. We differentiate three pillars of legal systems, namely (i) intermediaries and notary services; (ii) courts, judges, and trials; and (iii) companies and the financial market. We explore potential disruptions for each of them. We describe multiple scenarios which allow us to elaborate on the capabilities but also the limitations of blockchain technology.

This chapter critically investigates the application of blockchain technology for intellectual property management. To date, there have been relatively few critical discussions of the feasibility of utilising blockchain technology for this purpose, although much has been written, in media and industry sources, about the potential. Our aim, by contrast, is to examine possible limitations—and, subsequently, to suggest tentative solutions to the limitations we identify. Specifically, this chapter aims to examine the use of blockchain technology for intellectual property management from two perspectives: operation and implementation. We conclude that, while commentators often focus on technical characteristics of blockchain technology itself, it is the incentive design—which was fundamental to the original Bitcoin proposal—that is also critical to truly decentralised, and disintermediated, intellectual property management.

Over the last decade, the principle of blockchains has risen from relative obscurity in what was at the time a comparatively small community of Bitcoin users to worldwide prominence. The recent success of Bitcoin has led to extensive news coverage in mainstream media and widespread interest from the general public. Reports, videos and myths surrounding Bitcoin show how difficult the fundamentals are to understand for non-expert users, not to mention the fact that there is still very little awareness or understanding of systems other than cryptocurrencies that rely on the principle of blockchains. We hope this chapter will help demystify the concept and provide a sound introduction to the underlying technologies and consensus mechanisms of the blockchain. Although the term blockchain is closely linked to Bitcoin (to the point where many laypeople consider them quasi-synonymous), the term was not introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in the original paper that presented Bitcoin (Nakamoto 2008) as a prototype for a decentralized cryptocurrency. The term emerged in the Bitcoin community to describe the principle of the new cryptocurrency, and is therefore not standardized terminology. Therefore, there are two common spelling variants: blockchain and block chain. Although the latter was used by Satoshi Nakamoto in a comment in the original source code, the former is more frequently used in academic literature, for example, in publications such as Croman et al. (2016) and press reports, and can be regarded as a de facto standard. Therefore, we will use the spelling blockchain.