MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Unleashing the Power of Blockchain in the Enterprise

Blockchain is emerging as a foundational technology, but there is still groundwork to be done on standards development and the governance of change — and doing that work is critical to enterprise strategy.

Too many of us take for granted how well the internet worked for business in the early 1990s. By the time the National Science Foundation lifted commercial restrictions on internet use, Tim Berners-Lee had already launched the World Wide Web, and Marc Andreessen had developed the Mosaic web browser.1 Andreessen’s startup Netscape took about a minute to raise $2.7 billion, which was jaw-dropping at the time for an initial public offering.2 Thus began the dot-com boom, 30 years in the making.

In contrast, blockchain technology was born commercial, in the sense that it was minting scarce units of digital value from the beginning with cryptocurrency. As of this writing, the market cap of the Bitcoin blockchain hovers around $180 billion. In 2018, blockchain-based startup Block.one raised a record-breaking amount through its initial coin offering (ICO), whereas corporate cracks at ICOs such as Overstock’s tZERO and KodakCoin have largely fallen flat.