Technology Mapping Using WebAI: The case of sustainability engaged blockchain companies in the US
When:
—
Venue:
Online
Join the Department of Management as we welcome Dr Hannah Hottenrott (TUM) and Jan Kinne (ZEW and Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University) on Tuesday 28 March for an online lunchtime seminar.
Green IT and digital technologies provide opportunities for creating more sustainable business models. Yet some technologies, especially blockchain applications, are often criticized for harming the environment because of high energy demand or the use of rare materials in the production of hardware. The degree to which information technology contributes to sustainability likely depends on the application. This study presents a novel approach to identify sustainably and non-sustainably focused blockchain companies and relate their sustainability levels to location factors and entrepreneurial ecosystem embeddedness. For this, we use a large-scale web scraping approach to analyze the websites of all US companies via natural language processing and also capture the hyperlink network between these websites.
Our results show that blockchain remains a niche technology, with its use communicated by about 0.6% of U.S. companies. Our further results show that blockchain companies with an intensified focus on sustainability had, at least quantitatively, a more intensive embedding in entrepreneurial ecosystems, while infrastructural and socio-economic location factors hardly played a role. We interpret these results as indicative of the high relevance of entrepreneurial ecosystem embedding for the sustainable adoption of the novel blockchain technology. We discuss local (knowledge) spillovers as possible drivers, but also learning, inspiration and imitation in the wider partner network. However, we also point out that our results might only be indications of causal relationships that need to be explored in future studies using our data in the form of time series analyses.
Contact name:
BEI Events and Communications team