Dissertation: Blockchain as a General Purpose Technology

Leading experts from industrial, academic and policy-making circles describe Blockchain technologies as game changing and disruptive across multiple industrial sectors. However, the question, whether Blockchain is indeed an emerging General Purpose Technology (GPT) and, therefore, will determine macroeconomic dynamics in the next decades by causing substantial changes in the economic, social and political structures, is rarely addressed in the scientific literature. The project at hand covers this research gap by systematically revealing three acknowledged features of a GPT – pervasiveness, innovation spawning effects and scope for improvement - in a Blockchain-related data set. The dissertation consists of three papers. The first paper examines the degree of pervasiveness and innovation spawning effects of Blockchain and compares them to the other important technologies. Scope for improvement of Blockchain is the subject of the second paper. The third paper maps the research agenda in this emerging field.