The adoption of blockchain in the supply chain of global manufacturing firms

: motivations, challenges, and key success factors

Abstract

Global manufacturers face persistent blind spots that ultimately fuel disputes, delays, and costly workarounds. Although interest in blockchain is high and pilots are common, few initiatives scale across firms. In the academic literature, use cases and potential benefits are well mapped, yet firm-level accounts of how adoption decisions are made, and why promising efforts stall, remain scarce. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with supply-chain professionals in global manufacturing (n=21) and a Gioia analysis, the study reframes blockchain as shared evidence: attributable, time-stamped event records that trigger coded actions, rather than a generic database. Progress is shown to depend on a trial-first, measured rollout; executive-backed, quantified business cases; and co-authored operating rules that specify who records what, when, and with which proofs. Barriers include exposure aversion, weak posting discipline, uneven partner capability, bureaucratic drag, and concerns about governance trust. For managers, the findings distill a usable sequence: identify high-friction handoffs and the few boundary events that matter most, integrate their capture with existing systems, run a focused trial, measure before and after, and expand only when gains persist across lanes and sites; scale improves when joining is easy for partners and visibility is role-based and contractually bounded. Theoretically, the study casts blockchain as an evidence-centred coordination layer, maps a path from potential to routine use, shows how verifiable handoffs curb hidden action, and frames adoption as staged fit-and-feasibility checks tied to agency, affordance–actualization, and fit–viability models within a configurational view of success.

Date of Award	14 Oct 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Filipa Serpa Pinto (Supervisor)