Location factors and ecosystem embedding of sustainability-engaged blockchain companies in the US. A web-based analysis

Abstract

While many digital technologies provide opportunities for creating business models that impact sustainability, some technologies, especially blockchain applications, are often criticized for harming the environment, e.g. due to high energy demand. In our study, we present a novel approach to identifying sustainability-focused blockchain companies and relate their level of engagement to location factors and entrepreneurial ecosystem embeddedness. For this, we use a large-scale web scraping approach to analyze the textual content and hyperlink networks of all US companies from their websites. Our results show that blockchain remains a niche technology, with its use communicated by about 0.6% of US companies. However, the proportion of blockchain companies that are committed to sustainability is significantly higher than in the overall firm population. Additionally, we find that such sustainability-engaged blockchain companies have, at least quantitatively, a more intensive embedding in entrepreneurial ecosystems, while infrastructural and socio-economic location factors hardly play a role.

Keywords

• Sustainability
• Blockchain
• Ecosystem
• Location factors
• Natural language processing