Developing resilient supply chain networks has increasingly become a top priority of supply chain management due to higher frequency of disruptive threats and unexpected events, such as the recent global pandemic. Supply chain resilience is an inter-organizational, network‐wide, and multi-dimensional phenomenon that describes how the supply chain system anticipates and responds to disruptions and recovers from them while resuming normal operations. Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies offer significant potentials to remedy many of the challenges in achieving supply chain resilience. The decentralization inherent in blockchain-based solutions can help mitigate the problem of single-point-of-failure as well as security risks. It improves the mobilization of resources that reduces supply chain vulnerability while enhancing supply chain’s recovery ability. Blockchain can also help enhance other supply chain capabilities1 that may contribute, directly or indirectly, to the requirements of supply chain resilience at different stages of disruption. Recently, a few studies have adopted the security and risk management perspective to address resilience-enabling role of blockchain in supply chain2,3. However, an in-depth understanding of blockchain implications for supply chain resilience is still lacking. Relying on a dynamic capabilities approach to supply chain resilience and the idea of ‘let the data speak’, our research aims to fill this gap through a data-driven text-mining analysis of the state-of-the-art of research on blockchain technology in the supply chain domain. The corpus comprises academic publications indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection database from 2016 until the end of November 2020. Topic modelling based on the latent Dirichlet allocation – a hierarchicalBayesian approach – is employed to extract the main themes of discussion. To do so, a dictionary of the capabilities, practices, and performance attributes for supply chain resilience is established as the reference for analysis. The topic modelling is accompanied by a word frequency analysis of the relevant terms in the corpus. It is followed by a mapping study of the identified topics in relation with the well recognized supply chain resilience frameworks, including those of Christopher & Peck4 and Pettit et al.5. The results of topic analysis provide a structured model describing how blockchain can help create more resilient supply chains and how it comes in support of different supply chain resilience pillars. Also, the results of word frequency analysis using the pre-defined dictionary provide a quantitative assessment of how blockchain performs in relation to different resilience drivers and enablers. Based on the identified topics and the findings from the mapping analysis, a set of research questions is also formulated for future investigation. This study is the first attempt that systematically addresses resilience-enabling effects of blockchain in supply chain based on a thorough examination of related literature using topic modelling. Such an approach overcomes the limitations of purely qualitative literature analysis to extract knowledge and create insight. The research findings will be of interest for a range of industrial and academic audiences at the intersection of Canada’s blockchain and supply chain ecosystems. As Canadian industries are investing in blockchain-based supply chain solutions more than ever, the findings from this research enables supply chain practitioners to develop a nuanced understanding of how they can best leverage the decentralized supply chain in building resilience. It further creates insights into the post-adoption influences of blockchain and distributed ledger technology in the supply chain context. The findings are also relevant to Canadian providers of blockchain-based supply chain solutions. For the scholarly audience, the research offers a unifying picture of the depth and breadth of the related scholarly knowledge created so far and highlights the gaps that need to be addressed in this new stream of interdisciplinary research.
First Nations land acknowledegement
We acknowledge that the UBC Point Grey campus is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm.