Blockchain needs leaders that are committed to moving an industry forward and to collaboration. The resulting groupings of collaborative partners must have compelling answers to real problems.
Blockchain is therefore not a cause for the faint-hearted. You must be a natural leader in an industry and persuade others, including competitors, to collaborate for the good of the whole. That is not always a recipe for success.
94 companies have signed up to the Maersk/IBM blockchain initiative promote more efficient and secure global trade, bringing together various parties to support information sharing and transparency, and spur industry-wide innovation.
The 13 founding members of the Insurance Industry initiative B3i has deployed a blockchain application -Property Cat XOL contract. The short term focus of the platform is on handling reinsurance contracts on a state-of-the-art distributed ledger.
Timescales are still long-term however.
"But if we’re going to invest in this technology and push it forward, it does have to have an imminent return. And in a world in which a shareholder’s patience is relatively short, and we often work in 12-, 18-, 24-month time scales, it can be hard to prove that business case."
Brant Carson and Matt Higginson McKinsey Podcast September 2018.
They go on to say:-
"So on today’s implementations, there are still many limitations. Are we seeing evolutions? Absolutely. And I would argue that the blockchain protocols that we are seeing and reading about today almost certainly are not going to be the ones we’re going to talk about in two or three years’ time. This is a technology which is evolving rapidly. And, in fact, many flavors of these protocols are evolving specifically for specific purposes."
Just because 70% of enterprises are considering blockchain is not a good reason to invest time and money. You have to be able to explain why blockchain is important to your:-
- Strategy
- Capabilities
- Ability to solve compelling problems
Read more at "What problems would you solve with blockchain?"
If we think of other applications, things like insurance claims, the challenge there is, it could be the police, it could be a third party, who’s providing the information that says an accident has happened. Well, we can verify the who, who’s writing the information. What we’re going to struggle with is the what. Could it be possible to actually write fraudulent data to blockchain? Of course. You have this off-chain versus on-chain problem, which is, we have no control over the information being written.
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