Blockchain capabilities in supply chain management : a literature review

Abstract

Due to the unique characteristics of blockchain, such as transparency, tractability, decentralization, immutability, blockchain has been widely employed in multiple industries that request higher level of trust and security. Supply chain has a perfect match with blockchain, as both chains involve multi-party collaboration and coordination. The global Covid-19 pandemic in the past four years has accelerated the use of blockchain in supply chain. Prior researchers indicated that blockchain capability is increasingly becoming one of the important organizational IT capabilities, however, a thorough study or literature review on blockchain capability is rare in the literature. For the literature review purpose, this study uses Scopus as an academic searching engine to explore the past papers on blockchain capability in supply chain management, and summarizes the most influential 28 articles published in recent years. Based on resource-based view and appearance frequency in the literature, we develop a conceptual framework to investigate the internal and external capability dimensions of blockchain. The literature review results of this paper help researchers in the same research domain understand the components and measures of blockchain capabilities, and thus offer significant value in directing blockchain theory and practice in efficient supply chain.