Open Innovation and blockchain technologies: exploring implications in fashion industry

Over the years, blockchain and open innovation has experienced a continuous increase in academic production. In the wake of this scientific trend, our research aims to review and systematize the existing literature on blockchain and open innovation, with a specific focus on fashion industry. Our work is addressed to filling the emerging gaps related to the challenges and opportunities of Blockchain Technologies (BTs) in stimulating open innovation in the fashion industry. We propose a conceptual framework towards an open innovation perspective, by identifying the drivers that either facilitate or hinder collaborative networks through BT within industry. BT is a growing trend in the scientific literature and received extensive coverage in a wide variety of academic disciplines (Xu et al., 2019), especially on the internet and digital world (Shinde et al., 2021). Despite being frequently used as a buzzword, the blockchain has rapidly gained the attention of entrepreneurs, practitioners, governments, and financial institutions worldwide (Thees et al., 2020). As an emerging technology, blockchain has the potential to substantially transform management processes in several industries. Since it provides a trustworthy platform to connect firms and customers (Guo et al., 2020), in the fashion context it has the potential to shape the whole industry, leading to a radical disruption of the current business models and marketing practices (Caldarelli et al., 2021). The blockchain changes many activities and transactions within the fashion firms, but also affects the cooperation between them (Guo et al., 2020). There are many reasons behind the establishment of interorganizational collaborations in the textile supply chains (Wang et al., 2020), such as trust, facilitated by the main blockchains characteristics, namely traceability, immutability, security, cost reduction, and decentralization (Kosmarski, 2020). However, the benefits of adopting blockchain in the fashion context have not yet been systematically examined, as well as its role in supporting open innovation. It can be argued that blockchain technology could be a great tool for bottom-up social innovation (Jun, 2018).