International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management

Blockchain is undoubtedly considered one of the most innovative technologies in financial services from the past decade. Interests in blockchain technology continue to grow on a daily basis, while many promising blockchain-enabled applications and services continue to draw financial interest in the industrial sector and the broader financial services communities. Blockchain technology has the potential to streamline lending services and banking, decrease counterparty risk, and reduce settlement times and issuance. It indeed enables authenticated documentation and anti-money laundering (AML)/Know Your Client (KYC) data, minimizing operational ventures and allowing real-time/online validation of financial documents. Furthermore, as blockchain matures, it increases the value of a diversified range of industries and institutes with a better return on investment. However, such organizations must continue to adopt rigorous approaches to enhance their financial services and regulate their policies. In this article, we discuss the current status of blockchain-enabled financial services and applications, in addition to the impacts, implications, and regulations of incorporating blockchain technology in the finance industry. We further tackle the adaptation model for blockchain technology in global banking and provide a vision for the next generation of financial services based on this emerging technology.

This study presents an empirically well-versed picture of the intention to use blockchain technologies. Empirical evidence from two different regions — ASEAN and Middle-East (ME) — reveals factors that lead managers to use blockchain technology. Samples of 268 and 224 from two response groups were collected using a Likert-based questionnaire. The proposed model was tested using structural equation modeling with SmartPLS 3.2.9. Results confirm that the design of platforms has positive and significant relationships with consumers’ intention to use blockchain technologies. Furthermore, positive and significant relationships were also found between perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use with consumers’ intention to use blockchain technologies. Our results also indicate that perceived ease of use had a positive and significant effect on perceived usefulness. So far, there is limited standard relationship found between perceived ease of use and consumers’ intention to use blockchain technologies in the data from the ASEAN region. This study contributes to the evidence-based view on the effect of intention to use blockchain technology, on the roles of design, perceived ease of use, and perceived usefulness through proposing a novel framework. It adds to the field of technology acceptance studies by providing fresh insights among managers. The paper also emphasizes practical implications for business leaders who wish to capitalize on BT’s advantages in the industry.

Digital transformation affects the back offices of incumbent insurance companies. Digital innovations are implemented to be able to offer customers new products and services. We conduct multiple case studies with four German insurance companies. We analyze the impact of digital transformations on company-internal stakeholders with the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework. We derive 12 influencing factors and corresponding practical implications. Back-office systems are updated using standard software, if available. The goal is to stay flexible for future developments, too. State-of-the-art technologies are tested and only carefully implemented. Necessary reorganizations have significant impacts and are accomplished best with a trusting company culture, good internal communication, and well-trained employees. Efficiency gains from automating routine functions can and are intended to counter labor shortages. After the implementations, skilled employees must handle more specialized and demanding tasks, which cannot be automated easily. Impulses for digital transformation mainly result from continuously changing customer requirements and respective competitive pressure, while regulatory requirements often complicate implementations.

Considering the relevance of different market partners and research partners with which companies can cooperate for innovation, we wonder whether cooperation with such partners is essential for the technological upgrade of products and processes. Therefore, as our main aim, we propose to analyze the importance of cooperating with market and research partners to technologically upgrade products and processes in an emerging market. To do this, we used data from the Brazilian national innovation survey stratified by sectors of the economy. The data analysis technique adopted for this study was panel data. Our results add to the existing studies on the importance of considering the effects of different partners on types of upgrades (product and process) that are relevant to a technological upgrade in emerging countries. Furthermore, this research demonstrated which kind of partnership is the most suitable for each type of upgrade.

Discussion in the scholarly literature about partnerships between entrepreneurs and universities for the creation of technological spinouts, and for helping universities to extract more value from their technology-related intellectual property (IP), is lively. However, the literature exhibits a gap in understanding how business schools may participate in the process of technology commercialization by facilitating the creation of intellectual property rights. In this conceptual paper, we seek to fill this gap in three ways. First, we offer some novel conceptual insights by studying the partnership between technical universities and entrepreneurs using a multi-level approach, incorporating a phenomenological research method, through the lenses of several established theoretical perspectives from the domains of economics, social science, and management: the division of labor, motivation, the nature of the firm, organization, and IP. Second, we develop a working hypothesis focused on learning reinforcement through multiple organizational levels that predicts how business schools may play a prominent role in technology commercialization, together with the theoretical conditions under which they may do so. Third, we offer an IP management model under which business schools, as such, may create and appropriate financial value by generating innovation-related IP that may be transferred to enterprises. Our research reveals a misalignment between promising approaches to university-based technological innovation suggested by normative theory and typical approaches associated with extant practice; and it also highlights a strategic issue, which is that the performance of most universities in the domain of technology transfer is disappointing. We suggest a way to address this misalignment, and this strategic issue, which is through the establishment of what we label as “Technology Innovation Laboratories” in business schools—analogous to technical laboratories usually associated with technical universities—that could generate various types of product- or service-related IP. This type of intellectual property—typically different from invention IP, and which we label here as “business IP”—could be exchanged for equity in spinouts or royalties from licensing, similar to the manner in which the invention IP of technical universities is usually commercialized.

Innovative technologies from Industry 4.0 have penetrated all commercial business and industrial innovation sectors. To improve the current system’s efficiency, manufacturing and supply chains are implementing I4.0 technologies because they are the most crucial components of any business operation. It is important to identify the challenges that the logistics sector is facing. The logistics management for last mile delivery (LMD) using Industry 4.0 innovative technologies faces many challenges, creating a need for investigation. This study examines the challenges and offers a paradigm for an innovative industry 4.0 framework based on interpretive structural modeling (ISM). The requirement for infrastructure expansion and digitalization emerged as the biggest impediment to the implementation of Industry 4.0 in the logistics sector from the study. The broad framework for addressing issues with the distribution system rather than concentrating on a specific product or industry is presented. This study offers a general model that takes the challenges of Industry 4.0 operations at the primary and secondary levels.

Licensing technologies are one of the main ways to produce and bring academic research to society. Despite previous studies’ dedicated efforts to identify licensing probabilities, the question of how the expertise and prestige that a university has in a given technological field influences the licensing probabilities is still little addressed. This article aims to identify information in patent documents to estimate the probabilities of licensing technologies produced at the university. For that, we performed a data mining of licensed and unlicensed patents from an important Brazilian University (n = 1,578). We estimated the licensing probabilities using the Logistic Regression technique, based on the Maximum Likelihood Estimation. The results suggest that the variables of know-how in the main field and Technological strength in the main field are the most important/influential variables in estimating the probabilities of licensing a given patent. The main conclusion obtained from the results is that: universities, to obtain more licenses, must increase their know-how (expertise) in some technological fields, maintaining a reasonable level between specialization and diversification. Additionally, the higher the citations received (prestige/recognition) by a university in a given technological field, the greater the probability of patent licensing in that technological field. In terms of practical contributions, this study suggests that: investments in specific technological fields generate more competitive advantages for the university and, thus, more technological successes.

This study aims to identify the acceptance of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, by medical care providers, in healthcare institutions in Nineveh Governorate. The study uses the deductive approach through the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM2). The survey was conducted using an electronic questionnaire prepared based on several studies in this field. The data population included physicians, dentists, and pharmacists with the sample size being 341. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses of the study. The results revealed that job relevance and result demonstrability have a significant impact on the perceived usefulness of using IoT technology in the medical field, whereas, job relevance, output quality, perceived ease of use, and subjective norms have no direct impact on the perceived usefulness of this technology. Furthermore, the participant-perceived benefit does not significantly influence behavioral intent.

Positing that creativity is bolstered by greater levels of social relations with external agents, that arise through weak ties termed “open creativity,” we sought to advance knowledge of this process in coworking environments by placing emphasis on creativity as a phenomenon prior to innovation. In such an environment, creativity is then expanded through network relationships, through four increasing levels of interaction with external agents. In this qualitative, exploratory, and descriptive research, undertaken through the investigation of multiple cases, primary data were collected by observation and semi-structured interviews of users from three coworking environments located in a city in a developing country in Latin America. Open creativity emerges from the coworking environment’s characteristics and the actions and activities undertaken by users at the different levels of the establishment of open creativity. The implications of these findings for academics and managers are discussed.