Speciality Grand Challenges: Blockchain

The distributed ledger technology promises to change many long-standing economic and financial concepts through its unique properties of transparency, immutability, and distribution. Not only universities and other research institutions have identified this potential resulting from these characteristics, but also most business sectors are investigating the implications of this new technology (Zhao et al., 2016). Due to the enormous dynamics and the accompanying rapid development of the technology, research and economic interests are closely interdependent. While research institutions depend on the practical implementation of their research results, the business sector relies on the theoretical implications and the development of new fields of application. However, there is still a significant disparity between the academic implications and the actual practical execution. Risius and Spohrer (2017) argue that research predominately focused on technological questions, rather than on application, value creation, and governance. Despite the great interest of the business sector to integrate blockchain technology into business processes, there is still a lack of answers to central questions regarding the meaningful and effective use of blockchain technology in practice. Consequently, the scarcity of adequate solutions concerning scalability, governance, security, and regulation—among other critical attributes—impedes the diffusion and adoption of the blockchain technology in field applications. This circumstance certainly has a significant influence on the reluctance of the German economy to adopt the blockchain technology. While the majority of German companies are aware of the potential benefits of crypto assets, up until now no financial resources have been made available for its implementation (PwC, 2018). Irrespective of the rapid development at the technological level, a major challenge for the research community will be to also examine in more detail the application-related implications such as scalability, governance, integration with IoT, regulation, and security. This requires research institutions and industry to work closely together to address the following challenges collectively.