Last year, we announced the inauguration of the Innovation Alliance, a coalition of blockchain organizations with the aim of helping to accelerate enterprise adoption of blockchain. Alongside us, the original Innovation Alliance comprises of members including Singaporean blockchain fund Signum Capital, Asian blockchain and cryptocurrency hedge fund FBG Capital, leading global strategy consulting firm Roland Berger, and founder of TechCrunch and Arrington XRP Capital, Michael Arrington.

Since the inauguration, the Innovation Alliance has also welcomed CertiK, a smart contract and blockchain verification platform, and Celer Network, a scalable off-chain platform for decentralized applications, and Republic, an SEC-licensed, FINRA regulated crowdfunding platform, also joined the Innovation Alliance in July 2018.

Blockchain technology offers vast potential in various business applications including banking and trade finance, supply chain, healthcare, insurance and many more. Nevertheless, enterprise adoption of blockchain has not been widespread, leading some to criticize the value of the technology itself.

However, these criticisms have confounded experts. Leading research firm Gartner uses a “hype cycle” methodology to trace the evolutionary path of technology.

Gartner’s latest report on the state of blockchain in business shows that it will be another five to ten years before many enterprise use cases of blockchain reach the plateau of productivity. David Furlonger, the analyst who worked on the report, summarized the journey to enterprise adoption of blockchain with the statement: “This is not just a technology, this is a societal change.”

Therefore, it’s clear that if the true benefits of blockchain technology are to be realized, the blockchain community has a responsibility to help remove the barriers to adoption. This is the goal of the Innovation Alliance.

So, what are these barriers, and how is the Innovation Alliance working to break them down?