Towards More Sustainability: A Literature Review Where

Bioeconomy Meets Blockchain

Sven Willrich

, Felix Melcher

, Tim Straub

and Christof Weinhardt

FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik, Haid-und-Neu-Straße 10-14, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

Keywords: Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Sustainability, Blockchain, Literature Review.

Abstract: On the one hand, society has gradually grown awareness and importance of sustainability and natural

resources. On the other hand, blockchain technology gains increasingly interest and the impacts may have not

completely examined ecological, economical, and social. To present the state-of-the-art and hot topics within

bioeconomy and blockchain, we reviewed them equally and outlined future research threads. Based on a

systematic literature review combined with text mining and clustering, to enhance our data collection phase,

we describe a dedicated research thread and end up with real-word and possibly future-potential implications

driven by blockchain technology. Overall, this review gives important insights on how blockchain was and

could be engaged to add value towards sustainability at bioeconomy and natural resources.

1 INTRODUCTION

Bioeconomy brings natural resources and economy

together. It means being in exchange with natural

resources in a sustainable and responsible way while

using biological resources to undertake economic

activities (McCormick and Kautto, 2013). While

doing so, we consider scarce fossil natural resources

and general implications towards the climate change.

This kind of economy is trying to create a knowledge-

based production and usage of natural resources with

the goal of developing new products, procedures, and

services in all economic branches, with the focus of

providing a sustainable economy (Bioökonomierat,

2017). At the same time, with corporate social

responsibility (Orlitzky, Schmidt and Rynes, 2003)

and corporate sustainability (Gómez and Medel-

González, 2015) organizations are getting sensitized

and are taking such thoughts into the design and

distribution of products or services. Many researchers

agree upon the explicitly growing world population

cannot continue on the way they are currently in

exchange with natural resources and that new

sustainable ways to behave commercially are sought

after. It gradually becomes more and more important

to establish and to ensure a good governance to

natural resources (Devaney, Henchion and Regan,

2017). Hence, the topic around bioeconomy is also

touched politically, there are activities involved such

as participation and citizen science. As bioeconomy

normally includes a multitude of ecological,

economic and social parties with his own interests,

the cross-industries may consist of complex supply

chains. With blockchain has been arising, there is a

promising candidate to challenge uses cases where

trust between parties could be (is) an obstacle.

Theoretically, neither intermediaries are required nor

parties are enforced to trust somebody blindly in case

of an association (Nguyen, 2016) as they now are able

to get into business in a peer-to-peer topology.

In this contribution, we present a structured literature

review based on a text mining classification approach

(Yang, Zhang and Yan, 2017) (Yang and Hong,

2017). We use this procedure to cluster and classify

the literature results of the topic-related search

queries. Lastly, we discuss every auto-generated

cluster separately and go into depth, respectively.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

In this paper, we want to analyze the state-of-the-art

in the field of bioeconomy and blockchain to suppose

possible future research threads. To do so in a clear

and structured way, we follow the guidelines from

Webster and Watson (Webster and Watson, 2002)

and in particular use a proven approach (vom Brocke

et al., 2009). This method is a framework organized

Willrich, S., Melcher, F., Straub, T. and Weinhardt, C.

Towards More Sustainability: A Literature Review Where Bioeconomy Meets Blockchain.

DOI: 10.5220/0007786301070114

In Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications (ICETE 2019), pages 107-114

ISBN: 978-989-758-378-0

107

in five phases. Each of the following sections

represent one of these five phases.

2.1 Definition of Research Scope

To define the scope of our research, we use the

taxonomy described by Cooper (Cooper, 1988).

The focus (1) of our literature review is to find

related practices and/or applications where

distributed ledger technologies (DLT) aka blockchain

are used in the field of bioeconomy. Because the

combination of bioeconomy / managing natural

resources with the technology of distributed ledgers

is not widely discussed, our goal (2) is to identify the

central issues within this field. The structure of this

review is organized (3) in a conceptual way. Written

with an espousal perspective (4), since we are

convinced the examination of distributed ledger

technologies is not sufficient. Especially with respect

to the context of bioeconomy and a ledger with a

distributed infrastructure, that could fit in the field of

communal used natural resources. We address a

specialized audience (5) with this review, because the

terms and concepts, especially in the scope of DLT,

need a deep understanding of cryptography,

distributed databases, and knowledge about the

patterns of communication within computer

networks. Lastly, since we ask several academic

databases with the same key words in a breadth-

oriented search, the review reaches a representative

coverage (6) of the topics.

2.2 Conceptualization of Topic

In the second phase (vom Brocke et al., 2009) we

describe the basic concepts and terms to put an

overview about the contextual definitions needed to

understand the basics of our research area helping us

to find new keywords for our literature search.

Bioeconomy is the knowledge-based production and

usage of natural resources, to create new products,

procedures, and services in all economic branches,

with the focus of providing a sustainable economy

(Bioökonomierat, 2017). Goals of bioeconomy are,

e.g., to change from fossil fuels as the economic

engine to an efficient economy based on sustainable

energy. In total, the topic spans from encouraging

consumer to be part in a bioeconomy value chain of

sustainable consumption until the protection of the

climate (McCormick and Kautto, 2013). It embraces

political and society topics alike, and range from

participation and citizenship to democratic and

A person or a group of people.

liberation approaches. It has the claim to include

everyone, because every individual has an effect on it

and the bioeconomy affects everyone.

The rise of Blockchain / Distributed Ledger

Technologies has most probably begun when Satoshi

Nakamoto

had published his understanding of the

blockchain technology in 2008 (Nakamoto, 2008). In

this connection, blockchain can be understood as one

potential implementation of a DLT (Cachin, 2016).

As conceptualized, the potentials come from its

distributed and decentralized structure – resulting in

the missing necessity of any intermediary. Since

every central unit, e.g. technical, organizational, or

human agent can be supposed to be a black box.

Where the missing trust can become a problem,

blockchain provides an alternative way to interact

without it (Hawlitschek, Notheisen and Teubner,

2018). Hence, intermediaries might no longer be a

vital or indispensable part of transactions. Through its

public ledger and its consensus mechanism, the

transactions made on a blockchain are persistent in a

transparent, immutable, and traceable way

(Nakamoto, 2008) and consequently protected from

deletion, tampering, and revision (Iansiti and

Lakhani, 2017).

Furthermore, DLTs may have the ability to trigger

transactions automatically. With that feature, referred

to as Smart Contracts, DLTs are empowered to

execute programs at specific (time) events (Buterin

and others, 2014). The execution takes place as soon

as the event has occurred. These smart contracts also

enable a blockchain-based governance through the

concept of decentralized autonomous organizations

(DAO) (Reijers, O’Brolcháin and Haynes, 2016b).

The main purpose of a DAO is the decentralized

governance of “computerized rules and contracts”

(Chohan, 2017) in a transparent manner. We argue

that this kind of governance can be a promising

candidate for satisfying participatory requirements

needed for an effective bioeconomy.

2.3 Literature Search (Data Collection)

In this section, we have documented our literature

search. The research fields we target are relatively

new, that is why we do not set any boundaries such as

specific journals or conferences. At the end of this

section and with this information in mind, we want to

identify journals and conferences that cover our

research topics blockchain and bioeconomy most

suitable.

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For the field of bioeconomy, several synonyms

are existing while each meaning slightly differ.

Therefore, we have used the three most common

terms for this, i.e., bioeconomy, bioeconomics,

bioeconomic. In addition, DLT is not widely used in

publications, mostly the authors refer to blockchain

and use this term as the generalized name for the

technology. As a result, our first search query was

(blockchain AND (bioeconomy OR bioeconomics

OR bioeconomic))

In behalf of a comprehensive understanding of

our data collection phase, we explain the procedure in

more detail: We used a tool that calls the application

programming interfaces (APIs) of research databases.

These are IEEE, Springer Link, Elsevier, Crossref

and arXiv as they provide a convenient way to receive

machine-readable data for further analyses. The data

collection process consisted of three steps. In the first

step, we sent search query requests to the APIs. In the

second step, the query results got cleansing, which

consists of identifying and cleaning up duplicates,

removing papers not written in English (for better text

mining results), and information aggregation due to

different results emerged by different databases for

the same publication. In the final step, we saved the

results in a file-based database.

Our literature search took place in the period from

May to July of 2018. According to scope definitions

(Cooper, 1988), the final search (including the total

count) phrases to build our document corpus are the

following: Blockchain Democracy (5.879),

Blockchain Government (11.010), Blockchain

Sustainability (10.188), Blockchain (4.738),

Decentralized Autonomous Organization (19.549),

Distributed Ledger Technology (21.249), Natural

Resource Blockchain (13.109).

2.4 Literature Analysis and Synthesis

This section describes how we have analyzed the

(meta) data within the document corpus and shows up

some data insights. The next step in our analysis was

to cluster the publications with basic algorithms of

natural language processing (NLP) (Manning and

Schütze, 1999).

We have used the abstracts and titles to build a

bag of words corpus where we, have removed

An iterative process has led to an optimized query that

differs from our final search query yielding meaningful

results with respect to our research area, e.g., our first

query for bioeconomy had led to deep biology research

that are generally out of the scope of our review.

common and field-specific stop words, and stemmed

the sentences to tokens. After that, we have calculated

the Term Frequency – Inversed Document Frequency

(TF-IDF) weight

. Next, to find overlapping research

fields and to identify often-covered fields within our

topics, we have clustered the TF-IDF of each

document. This procedure is partly based on an

existing contribution on how performing literature

review by text mining (Yang, Zhang and Yan, 2017)

(Yang and Hong, 2017). To conduct our clustering,

we have applied K-Mean

to identify groups in our

dataset. To determine the optimal number of clusters,

we have used the common method in unsupervised

learning, the elbow method. To find the best k, we

have calculated the distortion score (sum of squared

errors) for a different number of k, in our case 1-10,

as we have sought for the smallest k with a low score.

The basis for our clustering is the TF-IDF matrix

Figure 1: Publications per year.

containing all tri-gram tokens in our corpus. We

reduced the corpus size before the clustering by

filtering out all data records without an abstract and

with less than two citations.Finally, after we have

reached our clusters, we have classified them

manually based on the top terms.

One result of the metadata analysis is an overview

about the publication rate over time in research for

our topics (Figure 1). This chart gives insights that the

research field around blockchain technology and

bioeconomy is continuously rising in the past years.

Developed in 2009, Bitcoin (and therefore the

blockchain) is not widely mentioned in any

publications before 2014. While bioecnomy has been

The TF-IDF is a statistical method used to evaluate how

important a word is within a document compared to the

whole corpus.

The k-means algorithm groups data by separating the

samples in n clusters of equal variance, trying to

minimizing the sum-of-squares.

Towards More Sustainability: A Literature Review Where Bioeconomy Meets Blockchain

109

a research objective for over the last decades. The

publication date analysis makes visible that since

2007 the count of released publications is soaring.

This explains that this topic is also becoming more

relevant in research in the recent years. The container

type

shows us that there are already popular

conferences and workshops explicitly concerned to

DLTs and blockchains, although it is only one decade

old, there are already 200 papers each year since 2016

and over 1500 each year since 2017. The “Journal of

Bioeconomics” is the most popular under all

containers in the field of bioeconomy

The following sections are descriptions of the

most cited publications within each of the four

clusters the k-means algorithm has calculated. The

results of the cluster analysis are available in a

GitHub repository

Supply Chain Management (SCM) is one of the

possible use cases in DLT sector and one of our

clusters. The SCM is an often-discussed application

type in the field of Distributed Ledgers (Iansiti and

Lakhani, 2017). Is useful to identify actors who are

involved in (Toyoda et al., 2017) to optimize. The rise

of a connected industry i.e. through the Internet of the

Things (IoT) takes a supporting role in a digital SCM

(Haddud et al., 2017; Kshetri, 2018). We analyzed a

papers for real-time information sharing during the

distribution phase of a product (Nakasumi, 2017) to

optimize the workflows to increase the transparency

between parties. To secure the post supply chain,

some IEEE members (Toyoda et al., 2017) proposed

a Product Ownership Management System (POMS)

based on a distributed ledger. Martin Holland et al.

describe a blockchain based digital rights

management system to secure the copyrights of,

especially safety-critical, products (Holland,

Nigischer and Stjepandic, 2017).

Another example to avoid counterfeiting with a

blockchain to fight against an international fake

medicine market was examined (Mackey and Nayyar,

2017). A more complex analysis of the healthcare

market and the possible adoption is described in

(Clauson et al., 2018). Feng Tian (Tian, 2016)

addresses the agrifood supply chain in Chinas

constantly growing economy. They developed a

system, which covers the whole process of

information retrieval and management in a agrifood

supply chain, which includes the monitoring, tracing

and traceability management for the quality and

Generic field for journals, conferences, workshops etc.

Find repository https://github.com/melcherf/ .

literarure-review_bioeconomy-blockchain at the commit

id: 64bf59d9dccf980f6b873e96b04510e914e3f916

safety "from farm to fork" (Tian, 2016). They argue

that China loses every year 170 billion Renminbi

(RMB) in the agriculture industry because of quality

problems and losses in supply chains (Chen et al.,

2017). There problems are avoided that traditional

centralized trust mechanism cannot solve.

While looking at SCM, the blockchain was used

to the management of energy. With microgrid energy

markets (Mengelkamp, Notheisen, et al., 2018),

(Mengelkamp, Gärttner, et al., 2018), (Zhumabekuly

Aitzhan and Svetinovic, 2016), the trading between

self-producer and consumer (i.e., prosumers) in a

peer-to-peer network is understood.

To build the bridge between bioeconomy and

blockchain from the energy application’s point of

view, the blockchain is effectively applicable

whenever the existence for central actors should be

vanished. If we argue from the natural resource

management perspective of the forest, it is desirable

to merge small forests together (Bundesministerium

für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft (BMEL), 2008).

This way, decentralized coordination purposes with

partners on eye level can leverage the emergence of

such associations in a transparent and efficient way.

Blockchain Protocol is the biggest cluster, mainly

focused on the Bitcoin design, outlining the fields of

security, privacy, smart contracts, the decentralized

architecture and possible on-chain applications. In a

historical overview (Bonneau et al., 2015), they

describe the origin of the first cryptocurrencies. They

also give an exhaustive technical overview about the

Bitcoin design decisions including the Bitcoin

Improvement Proposals (BIPs), developer mailing

lists, trying to cover the current specifications, which

has continuously refined since the release of the

original Bitcoin white paper (Nakamoto, 2008). A

selection of the specifications they describe are the

transactions, consensus, block confirmation,

(incentivized) mining and the impact on the

consensus. Further, they discuss the client-side

security, anonymity, modification of the protocol and

alternative consensus algorithms. This work is highly

recommendable to get a widely overview about the

Bitcoin protocol. In a more on the peer-to-peer

network focused paper (Decker and Wattenhofer,

2013) the information propagation between the nodes

is researched. They investigated the methods used to

broadcast the transactions and blocks through the

network and verify the aspect that a delay in this

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broadcasting could result in a fork

of the blockchain.

They also address possible improvements and

emphasize several challenges towards architectural

limitations. Non-determinism might be a problem.

Also described in this cluster are the Smart contracts,

the decentralized applications running on a

blockchain. They are applicable in several domains,

e.g., crowdfunding, financial services, identity

management, and gambling. It touches topics like

cryptography, consensus algorithms, and

programming languages until governance, finance,

and law (Buterin and others, 2014). To use the

benefits of blockchain without cryptographic

knowledge, a cryptographic protocol allows

programmers to write private smart contracts in an

intuitive manner (Kosba et al., 2016). Further

research concentrates on how making smart contracts

to be smarter and more secure. During the

investigation of security aspects, they have revealed

problems that may be utilized by adversaries to gain

profit and have argued how such vulnerabilities could

be reduced and security be increased (Luu et al.,

2016a). One task they describe is to enhance the

security within contracts; another task is to make the

input more trustworthy. Concerning this matter,

thoughts have given to trustworthy data feeds acting

as a bridge between blockchain and non-blockchain

applications. Following this, a blockchain application

to ask HTTPS-enabled websites was developed and

serves as a source-authenticated data to relying smart

contracts (Zhang et al., 2016).

Not just offline existing parties are able to

collaboration, coordination or cooperation across

organizations over the bitcoin protocol, but also

digital ones, i.e., a decentralized autonomous

organization (Luu et al., 2016b). DAOs are

organizations based on smart contracts (Swan, 2015).

When such DAOs are organized in business

networks, cross organization collaboration gets

possible (Norta, 2016). To take decisions

democratically, mechanisms to organize and conduct

elections are required, thus another research team

tackles voting realized by dedicated blockchains or

smart contracts (Yavuz et al., 2018a). To handle a

digital organization adequately, every-day and

strategic decisions are required in a recurring manner.

On the question of how such voting systems are

possible, a simple implementation is made (Yavuz et

al., 2018b).

A fork is a split of the blockchain in two separated ledgers

with the same history but a different protocol for the future

and is mostly unintended.

These findings address the challenges of

Bioeconomy. As already introduced, bioeconomy

implies the involvement of various parties working

together in, i.e., supply chains or associations where

previously independent organizations are merged.

Smart Contracts may help to set up an (decentralized

autonomous) collaboration, to organize it and to make

processes / decisions more efficient and timesaving.

Governance, the process of governing (Bevir, 2012).

To manage (social) systems and/or organizations, we

undertake several tasks to hold it healthy and make it

work. In literature, the implications of blockchain

governance are discussed, i.e., how owners and

managers of public companies are affected during

tasks around corporate governance (Yermack, 2017).

In this way, blockchain implications range from

technical to economic and strategic areas and may

trigger a need for institutional changes where

operative and organizational processes is affected.

For example, the information stewardship changes

while data is stored in the blockchain (Ølnes, Ubacht

and Janssen, 2017), apart from that it faces corruption

and wrongdoing perpetrated by frauds (de Souza,

Luciano and Wiedenhöft, 2018) through the aid of

transparency, immutability, and traceability. To

understand blockchain not just as a technology

enabler, but also as a possible next step towards

institutional evolution, decentralized, democratic,

and self-organized ideas come in (Davidson, De

Filippi and Potts, 2018). Banking is one of the most

popular domains in that blockchain-driven

disruptions arise, including how banks work as

organizations too, i.e., such a conventional and

centralized hierarchical organization is discussed to

be shifted into those democratic, decentralized, and

self-organized ones (MacDonald, Allen and Potts,

2016). When considering social and society aspects,

various governance models can be taken into account,

hereof researchers have examined the interaction

between blockchain and social contract theories

(Reijers, O’Brolcháin and Haynes, 2016a). Another

example was given by a libertarian viewpoint with its

remarkable resemblance to blockchain properties as

both bypass central authority and provide anonymity

(Huckle and White, 2016), but coordination and

reaching consensus could become more complex

(Shermin, 2017).

Bioeconomy may benefit from those blockchain-

driven developments as it also affects participation,

citizen science, governance, cross-industrial areas,

Towards More Sustainability: A Literature Review Where Bioeconomy Meets Blockchain

111

and SCM. Especially natural resources touch every

individual alike and are hence worth considering in a

democratic and representative way.

Decentralized Networks depicted in this chapter are

dealing with the papers in the cluster about mulit-

agent systems (MAS), the self-organization of

vehicles and robotic automation and wireless sensor

networks. In a vision of an effective bioeconomy

future, intelligent agents will do the work. Often

referred to as self-organized systems, MAS has many

similarities with a blockchain. To mention one, they

both need a distributed consensus algorithm to ensure

the integrity of the data send between their nodes or

agents (Saber, Fax and Murray, 2007). One popular

paper we discovered is about a theoretical framework

to analyze consensus algorithms in MAS with fixed

or dynamic network topology (Saber, Fax and

Murray, 2007). The scope of the framework is about

the information flow, the robustness when network

nodes fail, delays in time and shows the possible

guarantee of performance with different consensus

algorithms. In another paper (Willke, Tientrakool and

Maxemchuk, 2009), they surveyed inter-vehicle

communication (IVC) protocols and applications of

the last decade to classify them, depending on their

information propagation and consensus into four

types: General, Safety, group planning and individual

planning & regulation. Consensus algorithms for a

decentralized control of communicating-agent

systems are also discussed and analyzed (Xie and

Wang, 2005). Also the connectivity and coverage in

wireless sensor networks, used in military, industry,

agriculture, urban management, and their impact on

the quality of service is discussed (Zhu et al., 2012).

They examine current research results, solutions and

problems with focus on energy efficiency. To ensure

the authenticity and integrity of the data gathered by

sensors a blockchain could be a possible solution. In

our research field, MAS as well as wireless sensor

networks and the automation of processes could have

a huge impact on the development of an autonomous

organized bioeconomy.

3 RESEARCH AGENDA

In our structured literature review, we have examined

the state-of-the-art and most cited literature towards

the concepts of bioeconomy and blockchain found

with our keyword-driven approach. All in one, we

have identified several dedicated research threads by

our clustering approach. We describe each separately

and conclude each with relevant implications

between bioeconomy challenges and blockchain

solutions. Since there was no cluster dedicated

explicitly to bioeconomy and blockchain, it seems

worth to higher research efforts in this domain.

Literature have focused on supply chain management,

government and application development with smart

contracts on public domains or where companies

come together to work in an association with no

longer need for an intermediate. Especially the topic

around supply chain management and government

arises as a promising candidate to enhance

bioeconomy-oriented activities since transparency,

immutability and – in general – the benefits of

digitalization are driver to revolutionize

collaboration. Looking at resource management,

many efforts have flowed into energy tasks such as

Energy Internet, but natural resources have not been

an objective of research so far.

As for all publications to blockchain, it is true that

they are not the solution for all problems we are

currently facing and a requirement-driven approach is

advisable. Despite the benefits of blockchain, the

underlying question is related to trust (Beck et al.,

2016), i.e., is there any trust problem justifying the

blockchain application or can we meet our

requirements with a central and trustable party too?

Based on the review’s findings and the contemporary

challenges in the field of bioeconomy, blockchain and

its beneficial features are worth considering.

Especially when taking into account that DLT is in an

early state and scientifically not examined

completely, the impact is not sufficiently clear.

Therefore, further research may address the whole

system bioeconomy is embraced by. In particular,

including the society and all relevant stakeholder to

socialize the process of natural resources decision-

making by an appropriate blockchain design. Care for

transparency on society-affecting decisions and

provide a basis for natural resource governance in a

democratic manner and for the benefit of climate and

according to the Sustainable Development Goals

(SDGs) (Group et al., 2015).

4 CONCLUSIONS

We have made a contribution embracing two high-

rated and important topics, i.e., to what extent have

researchers examined how blockchain can support

sustainability towards natural resources within the

bioeconomy. In order to approach the topic, we have

conducted a systematic review by hybridization of the

proposed literature review process (vom Brocke et

al., 2009) and state-of-the-art text mining procedures

to receive clusters to be examined. We argue for this

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methodology as it allows reaching the cluster

emergence automatically and enables us to divide the

whole topic into dedicated areas that we have called

research threads – all of these in a deterministic,

replicable, and justified way. We have described each

cluster by reviewing the state-of-the-art (backwards)

and with discussion of possible implications,

potentials and challenges in the field of bioeconomy

and blockchain (forward).

Further, our literature review demonstrates that

both bioeconomy and blockchain in combination are

a promising candidate to become an emerging

interdisciplinary research field. Driven by this

anticipation, challenges the bioeconomy is

contemporary faced with and the solutions the

blockchain technology provides – this review shows

a growing activity and attention in both of them

fields.

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