Autor: Felix Eigelshoven

Innovation activity in the industrial environment is shifting towards product-service systems as a result of digitalisation. Small and medium-sized enterprises have so far focused their development activities strongly on product development. The switch to “smart” products and the coupling to services often requires personnel and financial resources that SMEs cannot provide. Crowdsourcing is one way of opening up the innovation process to external actors and realising cost and speed advantages. However, the integration of crowdsourcing elements faces several challenges. This article shows both the potentials and the barriers of crowdsourcing in the industrial environment.

Alongside to the enormous rise in Bitcoin value in 2017/2018, there was also a tremendous rise in required Hashpower and electricity to verify blocks of the Bitcoin-Chain. Deriving from this problem, this article investigates different consensus algorithms and their impact on sustainability. Furthermore this article proposes an extensive comparison of the most used Blockchain algorithms with a focus on their contribution to sustainability.