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.

Getting trustworthy data in the right format and with the required accuracy is imperative for organizational processes. All governments face this challenge in getting the high quality data for administrative processes, decision-making and policy-making. In practice, many government agencies still struggle with getting the right data in the right format at the right moments. Standard Business Reporting (SBR) is steadily developing towards becoming the national instrument for trustworthy data exchange. SBR includes a broad framework of standards for trustworthy data exchange and a comprehensive governance structure that steers adoption and decision making. While more public agencies are adopting SBR, this instrument itself has not developed to its full potential. Thus far, literature does not provide a model for assessing and communicating this potential.

Nowadays, the term "automation" is gaining extensive interest in both industrial and business fields. There is also a trend of achieving deeper automation in the business processes, which is a part of Business Process Automation (BPA). Among various BPA technologies, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has attracted increasing research attention. RPA is an emerging form of business process automation technology. The practice of performing RPA results in the deployment of attended or unattended software agents to an organization's environment. ChatBots, as the outcome of the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, has been regarded as a potential and powerful tool to achieve such cognitive automation in service-oriented business processes. However, limited knowledge on the design road-map and approaches of ChatBot implementation in the Business process hinders the ChatBots further deployment into company practical operation. Herein, the research is focused on the question: How should ChatBots be implemented in service-oriented processes? Chapter Introduction contains the introduction of this study, including the background, problem statement, research question, and thesis structure.
Chapter Literature Review describes the background of business process management (BPM), ChatBot technology, and the current state of ChatBot-implementation in business processes. BPM holds great potential for significant cost saving and productivity improvement, and the lifecycle of BPM serves as one of the guidelines for ChatBot-implementation methodology designed in the next chapter. Chapter Methodology Design introduces the requirements, design strategy, description approach, and validation and evaluation of designing a ChatBot implementation methodology. The requirements of methodology design are described according to the limitation of the current ChatBot-implementation methodology. Then the methodology design strategy is proposed. The methodology can be developed based on the BPM lifecycle, which ensures the business processes covered by the BPM lead to consistently positive outcomes and delivers maximum value to the organization, together with the Quark ChatBot implementation methodology. Following is the approach to describe a methodology. It is crucial to depict the methodology with clear logic. The analytical framework of Sol can be regarded as a suitable approach to describe the ChatBot implementation methodology. The framework consists of three parts namely way of thinking, working, and modeling. Methodology validation and evaluation are described at last. To check the validity and evaluate the methodology, it is necessary to use a case study to execute the methodology. By employing the method of case study, the methodology can be practically performed to automate a process by implement ChatBots. Accordingly, the validity of methodology can be examined, and the limitation of the methodology can also be explored, laying the foundation for the further improvement of the methodology. Chapter ChatBot-implementation Methodology designs the ChatBot-implementation methodology according to the design strategy and description approach in Chapter Methodology Design. It follows the analytical framework of Sol (1982). Chapter Methodology Evaluation evaluates the ChatBot-implementation methodology. The Call Management process of Philips IT Global Services was chosen as an example case to apply the ChatBot-implementation methodology to obtain an automated process.
In Chapter Conclusion, conclusions are drawn. Research findings answer the previously mentioned research questions. The major contribution of this research is establishing a theoretical ChatBot-implementation methodology for service-oriented process automation. Although, there still are some limitations of the work. For further research on ChatBot-implemented process automation, efforts can be focused on the executable process model, the business process model towards the ChatBot model, the extension of methodology application, the multi-process ChatBot implementation methodology, and ChatBot-based business process management.

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.

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.