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The proliferation of sophisticated e-commerce platforms coupled with mobile applications has ignited growth in business-to-consumer (B2C) commerce, reshaped organizational structures, and revamped value creation processes. Simultaneously, new technologies have altered the dynamics of brand marketing, enabling a broader reach and more personalized targeting aimed at increasing brand trust and enhancing customer loyalty. Today, the Internet allows marketers to penetrate deeper into their existing markets, create new online marketplaces and to generate new demand. This dynamic market engagement uses new technologies to target consumers more effectively. In this conceptual paper, we discuss how blockchain technology can potentially impact a firm's marketing activities. More specifically, we illustrate how blockchain technology acts as incremental innovation, empowering the consumer-centric paradigm. Moreover, blockchain technology fosters disintermediation, aids in combatting click fraud, reinforces trust and transparency, enables enhanced privacy protection, empowers security, and enables creative loyalty programs. We present six propositions that will guide future blockchain-related research in the area of marketing.

Author(s): Abderahman Rejeb, John Keogh, Horst Treiblmaier

Publication date: 2020

Volume: 3

Issue number: 3

Pages: 1-12

Electronic version(s), related files and links: http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fbloc.2020.00003

Blockchain technology is a secure and distributed information accounting, storage and retrieval modality which has the ability to disrupt and revolutionize business practices. One such disruption resides in the capability of Blockchain to serve as a secure method for storing and sharing electronic medical records in new and innovative ways. Current medical record storage and transmission methods are proprietary and have interoperability and security problems. To that end, secure, effective and interoperable electronic records options are highly prized. This study uses a grounded theory approach to qualitative analysis of electronic medical records users in the United States to develop a perspective from industry and scholarly practice on the suitability of Blockchain technologies for electronic medical records security and storage.

Author(s): Thomas F. Stafford, Horst Treiblmaier

Publication date: 2020

Pages: 1-23

Electronic version(s), related files and links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TEM.2020.2973095

Never in history have global supply-chain relationships in high-tech electronics firms been more sophisticated, complicated, and almost always tied in some major aspect to China. The setting makes interorganizational (IO) cooperation in a cross-cultural context, infused with Chinese culture and relationships, which absolutely crucial for global organizations to understand to have success in this environment. Ironically, although China is now more involved in this global supply chain than any other country in the world, this context is highly understudied, and most of the supply-chain literature is fundamentally rooted in a Western perspective and with data from Western countries and companies. This gap creates serious blind spots in theory, research, and policy, and leads to the research question driving this study: How does IO cooperation influence supplier performance in the context of China’s high-tech hardware components industry? In this context, we thus examines how IO cooperation impacts performance and what role information technology (IT) integration and relationship learning play in the value-creation process for suppliers in business-to-business (B2B) supply chains. In examining these two dimensions, this study proposes a model that differentiates between a supplier’s performances regarding (a) its major customer and (b) the general market. The researchers conducted in-depth face-to-face interviews with supply chain managers and executives from 1,004 Chinese high-tech electronic component suppliers. The results strongly support the hypothesis that IO cooperation improves a supplier’s performance regarding both its major customer and overall marketplace. Relationship learning and IT integration are important mediating variables that drive performance. This study makes notable contributions to the literature by simultaneously testing the influences of IO cooperation, relationship learning, and IT integration on supplier performance. A unique aspect of this study is that it focuses on a very large sample of a specific supplier type—high-tech Chinese suppliers. This combined with the fact that the sampled companies were involved in manufacturing 13 different product groups, greatly increases the generalizability of the results. The strongest effect in our study was the influence of IO cooperation on relationship learning.

Author(s): Neale O'Connor, Paul Benjamin Lowry, Horst Treiblmaier

Publication date: 2020

Volume: 6

Issue number: 3

Pages: 1-16

Electronic version(s), related files and links: http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e03434

Smart contracts are seen as the major building blocks for future autonomous blockchain- and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)-based applications. Engineering such contracts for trustless, append-only, and decentralized digital ledgers allows mutually distrustful parties to transform legal requirements into immutable and formalized rules. Previous experience shows this to be a challenging task due to demanding socio-technical ecosystems and the specificities of decentralized ledger technology. In this paper, we therefore develop an integrated process model for engineering DLT-based smart contracts that accounts for the specificities of DLT. This model was iteratively refined with the support of industry experts. The model explicitly accounts for the immutability of the trustless, append-only, and decentralized DLT ecosystem, and thereby overcomes certain limitations of traditional software engineering process models. More specifically, it consists of five successive and closely intertwined phases: conceptualization, implementation, approval, execution, and finalization. For each phase, the respective activities, roles, and artifacts are identified and discussed in detail. Applying such a model when engineering smart contracts will help software engineers and developers to better understand and streamline the engineering process of DLTs in general and blockchain in particular. Furthermore, this model serves as a generic framework which will support application development in all fields in which DLT can be applied.

Author(s): Christian Sillaber, Bernhard Waltl, Horst Treiblmaier, Ulrich Gallersdörfer, Michael Felderer

Publication date: 2020

Pages: 1-20

Electronic version(s), related files and links: http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-020-00465-5

Author(s): Horst Treiblmaier

Publication date: 2020