Blockchain Technology for Businesses: Trends and Research Themes

Blockchain, a recent transformative innovation, is increasingly becoming interesting to practitioner, academics, and regulators across several industries. Since the Bitcoin introduced by Nakamoto (2008), the blockchain concept emerged as the platform technology of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Blockchain has potential benefits such as transparency, distributed ledger, immutability of records, etc. (Iansiti & Lakhani, 2017), which are attractive for businesses. These advantages have the potential capabilities in transforming the end-to-end supply chain activities in businesses. The blockchain technology would resolve the problem of immutable ledgers distributed to many businesses in the supply chain (Maroun et al., 2019). Currently, customers are demanding details for transactions and the source of the manufactured products, including raw materials, suppliers, etc. Track and trace of all kinds of transactions would create efficient supply chain for businesses with more transparency and security (Francisco & Swanson, 2018; Notheisen et al., 2017). As most blockchain initiatives are yet at the first outset, this paper investigates blockchain technology through literature review using bibliometric. The bibliometric analysis for blockchain technology has been proceeded applying a visualization software to find out the prominent keywords, publication trend, authors and their cooperation and active countries in this field. The research uncovers some interesting findings of the direction and trends of blockchain technology and emerging research themes, leading countries, key authors, and new emerging topics.

Keywords: Blockchain, Supply Chain Management, Distributed Ledger, Transparency, Literature Review