International Workshop on Successful Strategies in Supply Chain Management Sample Template Paper

3. 
Research Methodology
We adopt an exploratory research approach incorporating both primary and secondary data 
collection. The former consists of 14 interviews (Table 1) conducted with experts from the 
LSC industry while the latter includes a comprehensive literature review on blockchain in 
supply chains, which further complemented by secondary case examples identified from the 
literature.
3.1 Comprehensive literature review 
Since blockchain is a relatively new topic, our review of publications from academic and 
practical databases such as ABI Inform Global, Science Direct, Google scholar and Lloyd's 
List Intelligence identified that the majority of papers and articles related to blockchain and 
supply chain are in recent five years (2012-2017). Within this frame, 65 papers were 
identified. Of which 24 papers were excluded due to lack of sufficient discussions on 
blockchain use in supply chain. After a full reading of the 41 papers, 15 papers remained as 
critically relevant to our research objective. These papers were then grouped into four 
categories based on the potential benefits to supply chain management, namely transparency, 
security, efficiency and less cost/waste (See Appendix 1 for a list of articles).
3.2 Expert interviews. The interviewees were selected from the research network the authors 
have built throughout the last decade. A semi-structured interview protocol was developed 
which consists of 15 questions centring on how interviewees make sense of this emerging 
technology, their perception about its potential impact (both negative and positive) and areas 
of its possible application in supply chain. Interviews took place between July and August 
2017 and typically lasted 45 minutes to one hour and were voiced recorded and transcribed 
afterwards. In total we conducted 14 interviews with both IT and supply chain experts from 
the field of logistics and supply chain (Table 1).