This research focuses on designing a digital platform that contributes to reducing food waste in Saudi Arabia. While a digital platform may not be an efficient and viable option to tackle this problem in countries with advanced waste management infrastructure, it is a feasible solution for tackling food waste in Saudi Arabia, given the current lack of infrastructure. It offers a quick and scalable approach that can be rapidly deployed to bridge existing gaps. Unlike traditional infrastructure projects requiring significant time and resources, a digital platform leverages existing technology to create immediate connections between retailers, consumers, and other stakeholders. The retail stage includes restaurants, cafes, and bakeries. The main stakeholders of interest are retail businesses. The main research question that guided this research is: What digital platform design can contribute to reducing food waste in the retail sector in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia in alignment with circular economy principles?...

In the past several years, financial applications of the blockchain technology experienced significant growth, development and adoption among the public and institutional investors. With the rise of stablecoins and major events such as the announcement of Facebook’s own cryptocurency Libra in 2019, the EU regulators felt the urgent need to address the digital currencies that may pose financial and security risks if left unsupervised. In 2020, the European Commission introduced the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework to regulate the crypto-asset issuers and service providers located in the EU or serving EU clients from abroad. One of the regulation’s objectives is to address the risks of the crypto-markets while leveraging its benefits, yet there has been no evaluation of the proposed regulation besides the Commission’s own impact assessment.

Thus, this research offers an evaluation of the MiCA framework by adopting World Economic Forum’s DeFi white paper risk framework and interviews with the industry experts to generate both qualitative and quantitative data that is used to construct policy considerations for future amendments. By conducting interviews with 8 legal experts, the study provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the MiCA framework, while the interviews with 2 respondents from crypto-asset issuer entities, 6 from crypto-asset service providers entities and 3 from institutional investors entities provided further insights into the perceptions of the industry participants on the EU crypto regulation. Moreover, the study presents the risk perceptions of each respondent groups as during the interview rounds the participants were presented 18 risks of DeFi and were asked to select the most 5 critical risks perceived by them. This information is used to reveal what risks are perceived by each group. Lastly, the study presents a content analysis to assess the extent to which the 18 risks ranked by the interviewees are addressed in the MiCA framework. In summary, the results of the study suggest many points of improvement to the MiCA framework with respect to definitions, scoping, classifications and the regulatory approach. Moreover, the results suggest that the policy makers should focus on the unaddressed risks in the future amendments and policies, most importantly on technical and operational risks that have been left out from the framework.

The Linear Economy currently follows the Take - Make – Dispose model. This paradigm is based on the consumption of resources rather than the preservation of their value. If this model remains dominant, it will lead to material scarcity, thereby increasing materials prices. The linear economy has a negative effect on nature as this model creates a tremendous amount of waste. Minimising the waste, maximising the value and facilitating the reuse of materials is the foundation of the Circular Economy. Lack of information regarding materials is recognised as one of the primary causes for waste generation. As a result, material passports were created to facilitate information sharing. However, some barriers hinder the application of these material passports. This research analysed the barriers and requirements of material passports and whether these barriers can be addressed through the characteristics of Blockchain technology such as transparency, distributive nature and security. However, a traditional blockchain has its challenges, such as scalability and an unsustainable consensus mechanism. In this research, a conceptual framework of Hyperledger Fabric (Private-permissioned Blockchain) based material passports is developed to tackle these barriers and meet the requirements. The framework developed aims to be helpful to create Hyperledger Fabric-based Material Passport by Material Passport Developers. Additionally, this helps the stakeholders within the built environment to understand the working of Blockchain-based material passports. The framework's validation was carried out by developing two scenarios, i.e., the Blockchain-based material passport and the BIM-based material passport and comparing them. This step was carried out to see whether the proposed Blockchain-based Material Passport framework will address the barriers of BIM-based material passports. In addition, semi-structured interviews with different stakeholders who use material passports to validate the framework.

Digitization often comes with its challenges. This thesis focuses on a new approach to innovating digital public services in the Netherlands. Innovation in the public sector encounters public sector specific innovation barriers, hampering the innovation process. Innovation in the public sector is still a little researched topic in the innovation literature. The co-creation lab is a proposed solution to overcome the innovation barriers through collaboration for innovation and experiments for innovation. Both of these have proposed benefits. Collaboration for innovation increases innovativeness and aids in creating ideas that are prone to adoption. Experimentation for innovation creates learning opportunities, increases the effectiveness of innovation processes, and proposes a solution to overcome governmental innovation barriers.
While the potential benefits of the co-creation lab are understood, it is unclear how the co-creation lab should be operationalized. This is the basis for the main research problem: Although experimentation and collaboration for innovation are adopted to overcome the government’s innovation barriers, it is not clear how to make those concepts operational in the co-creation lab. A tool is designed to support the co-creation lab’s operations. The design of the tool is the goal of the main research question: How can a co-creation tool be designed for a governmental innovation platform in which experiments are conducted with governmental IT infrastructures to foster innovation in the Dutch e-government? The co-creation tool is a tool that supports the co-creation lab in its operations to enable collaborations and to perform experiments. The main research question aims to solve the six challenges that are attached to the research problem: meager research into innovation in the public sector, the adoption of the quadruple helix model, enabling co-creation, requirements to perform experiments, the conditions of the technology used in experiments, and enabling use and reuse of already existing knowledge. The research is based on the design science research methodology of Peffers, Tuunanen, Rothenberger, & Chatterjee (2007), which focuses on design research of Information Systems (IS). This thesis alters the activities to create three research phases: discovery, utilization, and design. For the discovery phase, a review is carried out of relevant scientific literature related to the research challenges. Also, semi-structured interviews are conducted with five people close to the Digicampus to discover the current innovation journey for digital innovations in the Dutch government. The utilization phase is carried out by creating use cases about the process of the experiments according to the UML standard. From the use cases, functional requirements are derived. The design phase is carried out by creating a prototype of the co-creation tool. The UX program Sketch is used to create the prototype. The prototype is evaluated in an interactive workshop. The outcome of this research is a UX/UI design prototype of the co-creation tool. The tool’s design is a website that discloses the required information to support the innovation journey of innovators in the public sector.

In the past years there has been increasing awareness about the benefits of collecting and using more sensor data for businesses. This has led firms to look for data outside of their boundaries and use some data commercialization mechanisms such as data brokers, and open or privately-owned data marketplace. However, these exchanges solutions are controlled by companies which have a commercial interest that differs from users, leading to lack of transparency and lack of protection of data, loss of data ownership by the provider and no guarantee of fair pricing. These centralized data exchanges call into question the willingness of both data providers and data users to share data. As an alternative, blockchain technology can be used to reduce the control and interference of any firm, leading to a more peer-to-peer and transparent data marketplace. To improve coordination between stakeholders and to enhance a more automated marketplace, the system should be context-aware. The main contribution of this thesis is a proposition of blockchain-based components integrated within a context-aware decentralized data marketplace. Other parts of the system are highlighted, as they need to be subject to more research in order to achieve a fully functional and complete system. Finally, guidelines are suggested for generalization to other types of data and ecosystems.

The global market for real estate has experienced a significant growth since the financial crisis in 2008. The current global value amounts to more than $200 trillion and comprises nearly 60% of the value of all global assets, including equities, bonds, and gold. Yet, the commercial real estate market is inefficient and opaque due to its complicated due diligence processes and strategic behavior in complex multi-actor environments. Blockchain technology is often suggested as a disruptive technology that could increase efficiency, transparency and minimize transaction costs in various markets. Studies on blockchain point out that the technology has enormous potentials in the financial and real estate sector, but obviously has to overcome obstacles both business-, technological-, and adoption-wise. Even though the technology is still nascent, potential disintermediation of intermediaries such as notaries, banks, escrows and in particular brokers is a significant threat for them as they might no longer be necessary, at least in the same way. A qualitative explorative case study research combined with the application of Transaction Cost Economics is used to construct a decision path that can be followed to assess the applicability of blockchain technology and subsequently determine its impact on the sources of transaction costs. Following this decision path, we found that as of now, blockchain appears not to be the most suitable technology to function as a real-time, up to date database during commercial real estate transactions. Future research is suggested to focus on identifying the potential application and implications of property-specific building passports using smart contracts.

Product master data (PMD) can be defined as a set of data that represents a selection of characteristics and aspects of its accompanying physical product. For several reasons, these data sets are increasingly exchanged between organizations within supply chains. Although this process is traditionally often supported by non-automated technologies such as Excel spreadsheet, telephone, email, and fax, the adoption of data pools is on the rise. These inter-organizational systems allow the data supplying party to publish a product’s master data set in one centralized system after which it can be accessed by all subscribed data recipients.