SPECIAL TRACK INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT - COLURCIO-GASTALDI

Investigating determinants of blockchain adoption

MAURO SCIARELLI - MARIO TANI - FRANCESCO CAPUTO - ANNA PRISCO - VALERIO MUTO

Objectives. In recent times, blockchain has been used in several business contexts such as open manufacturing (Li et al., 2018), real estate (Veuger, 2018) and healthcare (Agbo et al., 2019). The strength of this technology is to have redefined supply chain management, creating new challenges and new opportunities in terms of reduced cost, efficiency, security and customer relationship.

Blockchain is defined as a “a distributed database, which is shared among and agreed upon a peer-to-peer network. It consists of a linked sequence of blocks, holding timestamped transactions that are secured by public-key cryptography (i.e., “hash”) and verified by the network community. Once an element is appended to the blockchain, it cannot be altered, turning a blockchain into an immutable record of past activity” (Seebacher and Schüritz, 2017:15). In other words, blockchain can be considered as an ordered, incremental, solid and digital block of cryptographically linked data (Zheng et al., 2018). The main difference between blockchain and conventional digital technologies is its distributed Peer-to-Peer (P2P) nature as it allows to transfer all the transactions worldwide, without a central server.

There are several benefits in the use of Blockchain technology in different domains such as strategic, organisational, economic, informational and technological categories (Olnes et al. 2017). Blockchain provides adopters some advantages such as: anonymity, immutability, transparency and fast transactions (Abubakar et al., 2020). Moreover blockchain allows the reduction of several costs (i.e. transaction, processing, administrative…) (Casino et al., 2019). The decentralized structure allows to completely eliminate intermediaries enabling the actors to interact more quickly and more efficiently. Focusing on supply chain management, the use of smart contracts reduces the complexity of processes and transaction costs (Kim and Laskowski, 2017; Tian, 2017). Traceability across supply chains will be improved, which implies greater efficiency in fraud prevention (Chen, 2018). The transparency and traceability provided by blockchain can address a variety of issues in supply chains (Wang, Han, and Beynon-Davies 2019), increasing trust in the brand (Boukis et al., 2019).

Boukis et al. (2019) have studied how blockchain can improve customers’ experience and how it helps in increasing their engagement with the brand.

The Blockchain and Distributed Ledger POLIMI Observatory (2020) have shown that during 2019 Italian companies invested approximately EUR 30 million in blockchain projects, a 100% increase compared to 2018, placing Italy among the top 10 countries in the world for the number of blockchain projects developed in 2019.

Despite its rapid evolution, blockchain still remains an immature technology with numerous applications yet to be discovered and it is still an hot topic that is more and more investigated (Kamble et al., 2019; Queiroz and Wamba 2019; Wamba et al., 2020; Wong et al., 2020). This remarkable growth requires a greater understanding of the main factors that lead companies to adopt blockchain technology.

#Blockchain #PLS-SEM #Technology acceptance model