Prerequisites for implementation of blockchain technology in enterprise: an empirical study of use cases across industries

Abstract

Blockchain is becoming an important technology of this decade pushing humanity towards the Industrial Revolution 4.0. The last few years have shown that companies have seen significant advantages in the new technology not only for the finance industry, but also for use in various areas of business. This study aims to fill a gap in the research of the types of companies that need to introduce new technology in order to identify an idea of those companies that benefit from changing current business processes in the future. The authors of the current paper studied the TOP-2000 companies from the USA and China as the main competing countries seeking to implement blockchain. The study examined the industries and use cases of blockchain in order to answer the research question: what are the key characteristics of companies that need to change their business model and implement blockchain technology in order to be stable and profitable in the near future? While the types of companies were studied using clustering models, the assumption that only a part of the industry needs to implement a certain type of use cases has been tested within the framework of classification models. The results showed that companies from the financial, entertainment and IT industries need to take a closer look at their competitors and make a possible decision to implement blockchain in their companies in order not to become lagging behind among competitors in the nearest future. Thesis format: academic (empirical).