The Promise of Blockchain for the Construction Industry: A Governance Lens

Abstract

This chapter outlines the promise of blockchain for the construction industry. Blockchain is an opportunity to create novel forms of economic coordination toward better collaboration within and across the built asset life cycle phases. Ongoing research tends to focus on blockchain to increase trust in existing processes. Instead, we argue blockchain’s disruptive potential is the creation of novel economic coordination. Therefore, we intend to advance the thinking around the promise of blockchain as an institutional innovation in the construction industry. First, we explain how the underlying cryptoeconomic governance mechanisms of blockchain can facilitate new decentralized coordination mechanisms between both humans and machines. Next, we provide an alternative vision for the governance of construction 4.0 to explain how cryptoeconomic coordination can address long-standing problems in the construction industry. Finally, we propose an adoption framework that can guide researchers and practitioners to explore the promise of blockchain and cryptoeconomics for the construction industry.