Local Social Innovation by Blockchain Technology: A Trial in a Provincial City in Japan

Abstract

This chapter describes the social application of blockchain technology with the aim of discussing how the concept and technology of blockchain can contribute to changing society. The safe recording system enabled by blockchain is valuable as a basis of supporting improvements in society. This recording system is expected to be combined with the visualisation of people’s activities by Internet of Things (IoT) devices and appropriate service design, thereby achieving social innovation to solve many social issues. After explaining the technical mechanism of blockchain, this chapter describes examples of applying blockchain in industry and local communities as well as a trial using a blockchain developed for solving local social issues in an aging society. As a discussion, we propose the way of alleviating social issues by using blockchain as a “social blockchain design”, which consist of (i) system analysis including analysis of the stakeholders and their relationships, (ii) IoT design to accurately digitalise human activities that are relevant to solve social issues, and (iii) service design to appropriately utilise cryptocurrencies as valuable resources generated from the data of digitalised activities.