Diffusion of blockchain technology :  Insights from academic literature and social media analytics

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Abstract

Purpose

Although blockchain is often discussed, its actual diffusion seems to be varying for different industries. The purpose of this paper is to explore the blockchain technology diffusion in different industries through a combination of academic literature and social media (Twitter).

Design/methodology/approach

The insights derived from the academic literature and social media have been used to classify industries into five stages of the innovation-decision process, namely, knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation and confirmation (Rogers, 1995).

Findings

Blockchain is found to be diffused in almost all industries, but the level of diffusion varies. The analysis highlights that manufacturing industry is at the knowledge stage. Further public administration is at persuasion stage. Subsequently, transportation, communications, electric, gas and sanitary services and trading industry had reached to the decision stage. Then, services industries have reached to implementation stage while finance, insurance and real estate industries are the innovators of blockchain technologies and have reached the confirmation stage of innovation-decision process.

Practical implications

Actual implementations of blockchain technology are still in its infancy stage for most of the industries. The findings suggest that specific industries are developing specific blockchain applications.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge this is the first study which is using social media data for investigating the diffusion of blockchain in industries. The results show that the combination of Twitter and academic literature analysis gives better insights into diffusion than a single data source.

Related collections

Most cited references 107

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Using Online Conversations to Study Word-of-Mouth Communication

David Godes, Dina Mayzlin (2004)

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Where Is Current Research on Blockchain Technology?—A Systematic Review

Jesse Yli-Huumo, Deokyoon Ko, Sujin Choi … (2016)

Blockchain is a decentralized transaction and data management technology developed first for Bitcoin cryptocurrency. The interest in Blockchain technology has been increasing since the idea was coined in 2008. The reason for the interest in Blockchain is its central attributes that provide security, anonymity and data integrity without any third party organization in control of the transactions, and therefore it creates interesting research areas, especially from the perspective of technical challenges and limitations. In this research, we have conducted a systematic mapping study with the goal of collecting all relevant research on Blockchain technology. Our objective is to understand the current research topics, challenges and future directions regarding Blockchain technology from the technical perspective. We have extracted 41 primary papers from scientific databases. The results show that focus in over 80% of the papers is on Bitcoin system and less than 20% deals with other Blockchain applications including e.g. smart contracts and licensing. The majority of research is focusing on revealing and improving limitations of Blockchain from privacy and security perspectives, but many of the proposed solutions lack concrete evaluation on their effectiveness. Many other Blockchain scalability related challenges including throughput and latency have been left unstudied. On the basis of this study, recommendations on future research directions are provided for researchers.

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Healthcare Data Gateways: Found Healthcare Intelligence on Blockchain with Novel Privacy Risk Control.

Xiao Yue, Huiju Wang, Dawei Jin … (2016)

Healthcare data are a valuable source of healthcare intelligence. Sharing of healthcare data is one essential step to make healthcare system smarter and improve the quality of healthcare service. Healthcare data, one personal asset of patient, should be owned and controlled by patient, instead of being scattered in different healthcare systems, which prevents data sharing and puts patient privacy at risks. Blockchain is demonstrated in the financial field that trusted, auditable computing is possible using a decentralized network of peers accompanied by a public ledger. In this paper, we proposed an App (called Healthcare Data Gateway (HGD)) architecture based on blockchain to enable patient to own, control and share their own data easily and securely without violating privacy, which provides a new potential way to improve the intelligence of healthcare systems while keeping patient data private. Our proposed purpose-centric access model ensures patient own and control their healthcare data; simple unified Indicator-Centric Schema (ICS) makes it possible to organize all kinds of personal healthcare data practically and easily. We also point out that MPC (Secure Multi-Party Computing) is one promising solution to enable untrusted third-party to conduct computation over patient data without violating privacy.