Table 7.
Potential research in different industrial sectors.
| Sectors | Details |
|---|---|
| Finance | Blockchain technology is not scalable enough to handle the amount of transactions taking place in the finance industry on a daily basis. Also, determining power and access allowance to different entities and actors based on their size and contribution is a major problem that needs to be resolved to garner the benefits of blockchain. Lack of industry wide standardization of also is a hindrance in the adoption of the blockchain based DLT solutions. |
| Manufacturing | Blockchain can be implemented to improve machine communication and asset sharing so that all the operations can be integrated into a decentralized environment. Further, research should also be made to identify the use cases of blockchain in 3-D printing, product digitalization and distributed manufacturing.Another future scope in the manufacruting sector is to utilize the collaborative efforts from producers, users, and other stakeholders alike for better management of product life cycle (Kiritsis et al., 2014). |
| Shipping and maritime | Due to lack of complete and integrated information, blockchain adoption remains a challenge in shipping industry. Information flow needs to be improved and a unique blockchain model needs to be designed which will help integrate all the disoriented stakeholders together. |
| Energy | While current efforts are focused on peer-to-peer energy trading, blockchain technology has the potential to accurately track the energy production and usage assisting in real time monitoring of energy performance and enhancing supply- demand efficiency. |
| Healthcare | Blockchain must overcome the barriers of organizational preparedness and data ownership to be able to benefit the healthcare sector. The uncertainty surrounding rules and regulations need to be catered. Also, blockchain needs enormous storage capacity which needs to be affordable and manageable to implement. |
| Food and agriculture | Blockchain can significantly benefit the farmers and other underprivileged sections of the society by reducing the intermediators involved and improve transparency in the process. Blockchain based digitization and traceability can be used in both plants as well as animal food chains. However, the challenges for such an implementation are varied as per different industry needs, skill set of workforce and technical capabilities. But blockchain holds great potential in saving time, increasing customer trust and reducing costs and risks in the food SC (Longo et al., 2019a). Hence, focus is needed to give the blockchain research and implementations in social aspect and direction. A solution can be developed for automated payments and proof of delivery where the parties are paid in cryptocurrencies automatically upon physical delivery of crops (Salah et al., 2019). |
| Aviation | The future scope of blockchain may include the utilization of the mean variance theory to be applied for the management of flight schedules with varying lead times (Choi et al., 2019). Airport Collaborative Decision-Making disruption management system can be developed to standardize and streamline every decision involved in operation of airport for better efficiency and coordination (Vaio and Varriale, 2019). |
| E-commerce | Implement RFIDs enabled with blockchain and do a cost benefit analysis through a pilot project in the e-commerce sector. Research needs to be done to understand the implementation and adoption challenges for blockchain in e-commerce so that it can eliminate the issues related to product counterfeiting and tampering of data by intruders |
| Education | Blockchain can be utilized to eliminate the problem of fake degrees and fake background verifications by integrating all the data together on a single immutable platform which will be much easier and faster to access. |
| Entertainment and meida | Operations can be made more transparent and secure via smart contracts so as to ensure hierarchy and authority-based access control. |
| Fashion | Blockchain can be implemented to enhance the poor data quality problem for demand forecasting in the fashion industry of emerging markets. |