Public value creation is traditionally considered as the citizens' collective expectations with respect to government and public services. Recent e-government literature indicates that what exactly constitutes public value in digital government is still debated. Whereas previous research acknowledges aspects such as co-production and the orchestration role of government in the context of public value creation, there is only a limited understanding of how public value is created by the interactions between government and business actors, and the role digital technologies play in that process. Furthermore, so far, research into public value creation processes is limited to specific services that aim to meet a specific goal; for a more complete view, an integrative perspective is required to address the multiplicity of goals. Societal challenges including climate change, sustainability, and the transition towards circularity will require governments to play a crucial role. Businesses are also transforming their vision by adding societal goals to their economic objectives and contributing to these societal challenges. This necessitates even more the need to explicitly consider the role of business in public value creation processes. In this paper we argue that there is a need to understand public value creation as an interactive process, involving both government and business actors. In this process, voluntary information sharing enabled by digital infrastructures has the potential to contribute to the value creation processes, but the increased complexity of digital technologies obscures the effects they can have on value creation. Therefore, we develop a framework that allows to reason about public value creation as an interactive process, involving government and businesses, facilitated by voluntary information sharing. The framework also allows to reason about how the technological design choices of the underlying digital infrastructure influence this value creation process. For the framework development, we use an in-depth case study from the domain of international trade. We analyze the interactions between customs authorities and supply chain actors for jointly creating public value related to revenue collection, as well as safety and security of goods entering the European Union, using business data made available via a global blockchain-enabled infrastructure. In future research, the framework that we developed can be used to analyze more complex cases with additional public value aspects, such as sustainability and circularity.

Blockchain technology has emerged as new technology and governments are now exploring its potential for realizing value. In recent years, studies have focused on identifying opportunities and barriers of blockchain-based applications for government, and multiple piloting initiatives have been started to experiment and test the potential of this technology. Nevertheless, many of these blockchain initiatives are in the pilot stage. For the initiatives that have reached a large-scale implementation or production stage, these are largely on a local (municipal) or national level. There is limited research on operational blockchain-enabled infrastructures implemented on a global level and how they can be used by government organizations to create value. This is an area that we set out to explore with this paper. In this paper, we take the specific focus on business-government information sharing via a global blockchain-enabled platform (TradeLens) to create value for business and government. As a case study, we focus on examining the case of importing tires from China to the Netherlands and the value creation processes for the tire importer and customs enabled by information sharing via the TradeLens platform. From a theoretical perspective, building on two models that have been published earlier, we propose a framework that explicitly allows to link and reason about business-government information sharing enabled by blockchain, how it enables value creation for both business and government, and the technical blockchain design choices that are linked to this value creation process.