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From Mutualism to Amensalism: A Case Study of Blockchain and Digital Identity Wallets

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Business Modeling and Software Design (BMSD 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 523))

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Abstract

Innovation with emerging technologies is often challenging. They are still evolving and many are surrounded by unbalanced claims and hyperbole, which give rise to ambiguity and complicate adoption. These difficulties become even more pronounced when organizations attempt to introduce two loosely coupled emerging technologies. Building on a six-year case-study of the European Blockchain Partnership that attempted to simultaneously introduce blockchain and digital identity wallets, we flesh out the evolution their relationship. Our analysis surfaces a complex material-discursive process that first only discursively and later also materially de-coupled the two technologies along three population ecology principles for species interaction: technological mutualism, technological commensalism, and technological amensalism. Our study contributes an information systems perspective on the enactment and evolution of loosely coupled emerging technologies. Moreover, we use insights from population ecology to better explain and understand the underlying mechanisms.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded in part by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) and PayPal, PEARL grant reference 13342933/Gilbert Fridgen, grant reference NCER22/IS/16570468/NCER-FT, and grant reference 14783405, as well as Luxembourg’s Ministry for Digitalisation. For the purpose of open access, and in fulfillment of the obligations arising from the grant agreement, the authors have applied a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sam M. Walton College of Business, University of Arkansas, 220 N McIlroy Ave #301, Fayetteville, AR, 72701, USA

    Tamara Roth & Alexander Rieger

  2. Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability, and Trust, University of Luxembourg, 29 Av. John F. Kennedy, 1855, Kirchberg, Luxembourg

    Tamara Roth, Alexander Rieger & Alexandra Hoess

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  1. Tamara Roth
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Correspondence to Tamara Roth .

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  1. Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, University of Library Studies and Information Technologies, Sofia, Bulgaria

    Boris Shishkov

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Roth, T., Rieger, A., Hoess, A. (2024). From Mutualism to Amensalism: A Case Study of Blockchain and Digital Identity Wallets. In: Shishkov, B. (eds) Business Modeling and Software Design. BMSD 2024. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 523. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-64073-5_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-64073-5_10

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