Defence of doctoral thesis in the field of industrial engineering and management, M.Sc. (Econ. & B.A) Juri Mattila
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Cryptocurrency enables new degrees of co-opetition in digital platforms
Juri Mattila’s doctoral dissertation ’Blockchain Systems as Multi-sided Platforms’ sets out to answer the question why blockchain innovations have not transformed the development of digitalization as predicted in the past decade. The dissertation concludes that blockchain technology has had a transformative impact on digitalization, but in a different manner than formerly anticipated.
The transformative impact of blockchain systems has been previously examined largely from the perspectives of digital money, decentralization, and digital trust. This dissertation contextualizes blockchain systems from a novel perspective as multi-sided platforms, painting a different picture of their transformative impact than before. From this point of view, blockchain systems represent a comprehensive change in the design philosophy regarding IT systems where platform solutions are designed and deployed based on their incentive structure.
– For example, in the Bitcoin cryptotoken system, the mining effort that secures the network quite possibly constitutes the fastest grid computing cloud in the world today. This entire collaboration has emerged without the need for any legal contracts, and without the participants even knowing the other participants or their motives. This is an enormous transformation in terms of what kind of collaboration peer-to-peer networks and digital platforms can facilitate. The complexity and the growth are on a whole another level than what was seen before, Mattila explains.
Blockchain systems have not been comprehensively delineated as multi-sided platforms in academia before. The role of cryptotokens in facilitating co-opetition between the participants has also not been formerly fully recognized. The dissertation describes how multi-faceted co-opetition dynamics exist between the participants in blockchain systems. While beneficial for growth, the dynamics involve new challenges e.g. in strategic decision-making.
The dissertation also offers a new perspective on the dependency between blockchain systems and the incumbent digital platform giants. As one discussion point, the dissertation asks whether blockchain technology is developing into a predatory innovation allowing the platform incumbents to circumvent anti-trust regulations more extensively than before.
Opponent: Professor Aija Leiponen, SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University, USA
Custos: Professor Risto Rajala, Aalto University School of Science,Department of Industrial Engineering and Management
Contact details of the doctoral candidate: [email protected], +358 43 825 8238
The public defence will be organised via Zoom. Link to the event
The dissertation is publicly displayed 10 days before the defence in the publication archive Aaltodoc of Aalto University