*5.1. Systematic Literature Review Results*

The study analyses 183 articles, out of which 28 are from the industry for the sample period from 2012 to 2020. By reading through prior literature, we are able to broadly classify them into the following key themes: 1. exchanges and CG, 2. corporate voting and CG, 3. practice and education of BC, 4. BC and CG, 5. regulation, 6. BC technology related to CG, 7. ICOs and crowdfunding, 8. cryptocurrencies and 9. other. The "Other" theme includes articles with a prime focus in another area than the themes identified with regard to blockchain but still having some relevant factors to draw upon for blockchain adoption in corporate governance.

#### Academic and Industry Article Comparison

Table 2 identifies the number of articles that focus on the key themes utilized to develop the decentralized autonomous corporate governance framework (DACGF) in this study. According to Table 2, the industry focus is primarily on the two themes of stakeholders (23 studies) and blockchain impact and value creation (20) from our DACG framework. Academic studies primarily focus on market mechanisms (60 studies) and blockchain governance (57 studies). Corporate governance emerges as an underexplored area by both academic (7 studies) and industry (1 study) literature, highlighting the importance of our study and the DACG framework. Table A1 is provided as a separate Internet Appendix A for brevity and identifies the themes from the systematic review on blockchain adoption in corporate governance among academic studies and industry articles.

**Table 2.** Focus counts for framework development from prior literature.


Source: CB insights, PwC, ICO Insights and Token Data.

Figure 1 depicts the industry and academic article count across time, and Figure 2 provides the article count by key themes for industry and academic literature and the aggregate of both. In Figure 2, several articles from both industry and academic may overlap across several themes. Figure 2 further enables us to identify the trends, gaps and similarities between academic literature and industry reports.

**Figure 1.** Year-wise article count.

#### *Int. J. Financial Stud.* **2020**, *8*, 36

**Figure 2.** Topic-wise article count for academic and industry articles and total aggregate.

According to Figure 1, articles skyrocketed during 2017 and 2018 for academia, with 43 and 38 and for industry, with 5 and 4 articles, respectively. However, the year with the greatest number of articles from the industry with some relevance for corporate governance was 2015 (8 studies). This count suggests that academia seems to lag behind industry by two years in terms of blockchain articles with factors relevant for corporate governance. Due to some stringent regulatory measures and bans in 2018 in China, there is a significant decline post-2018 (Allan and Hagiwara 2018), with only 20 academic studies in 2019. This trend is likely to reverse with interest picking up due to COVID-19 and renewed interest from China. Figure 2 displays the theme-specific distribution of our sample of 183 articles. These themes are identified from our systematic review as opposed to the earlier themes mentioned that are directly from our DACG framework. According to Figure 2, academic articles mostly focus on regulation (49 studies) and ICOs (46 studies). Industry articles primarily focus on exchanges (10 studies) and cryptocurrencies (9 articles). This result is understandable, as most industry applications tend to focus on digital or cryptocurrencies and their many applications in financial services. These numbers highlight the interdisciplinary potential of blockchains across industries.

## *5.2. Textual Analysis*

The first step in manually identifying differences, gaps and trends between academic and industry literature involves carefully reviewing the text body. However, as an additional step, these three resource maps further help to differentiate between academic and industry literature. Moreover, to develop the DACG framework, we use textual analysis to obtain a broad perspective of prior literature and industry reports. Through this, we identify the key themes and which studies are clustered around them as explained in the first part of Section 5.1.

#### The Map

The resource maps below provide information about the main concepts across the literature analysed and finally the similarities in the contexts in which they occur. This analysis helps us to develop our DACG framework and to identify key themes. Figure 3 shows words such that the terms that occur the most frequently are positioned centrally and are of the largest size for academic and industry literature, thus, providing an overall birds-eye view of the entire sample of 183 articles. According to the large-sized and nearby linked words, we can observe that Figure 3 identifies 1. blockchain, 2. technology, 3. markets, 4. financial, 5. shareholders, 6. transactions, 7. information and 8. transparency as key themes emerging from prior literature. By coding those themes and giving them context, we can identify that they relate to focus on blockchain technology itself: blockchains in finance and financial markets, blockchains in exchanges with links to shareholders, blockchains for payment systems with links to transactions, and finally blockchain features such as transparency

and information on a blockchain. Further examples and explanations of blockchain applications are explained in Section 6.

**Figure 3.** Resource map from textual analysis of both industry and academic literature.

Figures 4 and 5 display resource maps for academic and industry literature separately. By comparing key themes identified in Figures 4 and 5 we again explore the differences, similarities and gaps between academic and industry literature. Figure 5 depicts 1. blockchain, 2. Bitcoin, 3. technology, 4. financial, 5. transactions, 6. network, 7. fintech, 8. governance, 9. markets and 10. ledger as key themes in the academic literature. Meanwhile, Figure 5 shows 1. blockchain, 2. markets, 3. technology, 4. business, 5. global, 6. privacy, 7. Bitcoin, 8. industry, 9. transactions, 10. bank, 11. currencies and 12. fintech as key themes from industry reports. By comparing these themes, we can identify that both industry and academic literature can be largely concentrated on 1. Bitcoin, 2. markets, 3. technology and 4. fintech. This shows the preferred blockchain-based areas in Bitcoin, blockchains in markets, technology of blockchains itself and use of blockchain as a financial technology. However, the industry and academic interests diverge in the following cases: industry focuses on 1. privacy, 2. business and 3. global, and academia focuses on 1. governance, 2. networks and 3. ledger. Giving context to these themes would enable us to observe that industry focuses more on blockchain potential on a global scale, with business applications and features of blockchain such as privacy. However, the academic literature is relatively narrower by exploring blockchain governance and blockchain architecture with regard to its networks and the decentralised nature of blockchains.

**Figure 4.** Resource map from textual analysis of academic literature.

**Figure 5.** Resource map from textual analysis of industry literature.
