Blockchain and Recordkeeping: Editorial

Distributed ledger technologies (DLT), including blockchains, combine the use of cryptography and distributed networks to achieve a novel form of records creation and keeping designed for tamper-resistance and immutability. Over the past several years, these capabilities have made DLTs, including blockchains, increasingly popular as a general-purpose technology used for recordkeeping in a variety of sectors and industry domains, yet many open challenges and issues, both theoretical and applied, remain. This editorial introduces the Special Issue of Computers focusing on exploring the frontiers of blockchain/distributed ledger technology and recordkeeping.

How to Appropriate Value from General-Purpose Technology by Applying Open Innovation

Artificial intelligence increasingly attracts attention and investments. However, appropriating value from this general-purpose technology (GPT) can be difficult. To understand these challenges, this article analyzes why IBM failed to generate significant profits from IBM Watson Health despite its promising starting points. The findings suggest that, considering the characteristics of GPT, an overly closed approach for taking it to market contributed to the failure. Furthermore, conditions such as the immaturity and the complexity of the application field intensified the challenges. This study suggests that using a strong appropriability regime in open innovation can enhance the appropriation of value from a GPT.

The decline of computers as a general purpose technology

Technological and economic forces are now pushing computing away from being general purpose and toward specialization.

The multifaceted dimensions of potent nanostructures: a comprehensive review

Nanoscience as a powerful general-purpose technology for commercialization.

General Purpose Technology: The Blockchain Domain

Blockchain is an emerging evolutionary paradigm that is expected to revolutionize existing business models in many industries and impact the world economy and society. Its potential pervasiveness is increasingly drawing the interest of academics, practitioners, firms, financial institutions, and national governments, who define it as a general purpose technology (GPT). Although it may take considerable time to affirm a technology as general, in this phase of the evolution of the blockchain domain, to what extent can it be considered a GPT? By adopting a patent co-classifications analysis, this paper aims at disentangling the blockchain technology structure, evolution, and potential future trends. We analyzed blockchain international patents issued from 2008 to 2018. Results showed a proliferation of the inventive activity outputs and a significant increase in the diversification across different technology fields, capturing the blockchain’s GPT traits. Moreover, our patent measures detected technology dynamics related to ‘space for improvement’ and ‘pervasiveness’ that commonly characterize GPTs. Our study contributes to the technology innovation literature by uncovering the emergence and evolutionary path of a GPT, and our results provide an empirical basis on which managers can build technology-related decisions and systems to enable appropriate firms’ innovation strategies.