Nfts at the Nexus of Innovation and Sustainability: A Framework Aligning NFT Affordances with the Sustainable Development Goals

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are goals associated with the most significant global issues, which include climate, health, security, and poverty. The goals are part of an agenda for making progress on environmental, social, and economic issues while ensuring peace and leaving no one behind. Meeting these goals requires effort and innovation on all fronts, including technology. Information and communication technologies have long contributed to these efforts, and more recently, blockchain for good projects have begun to bear fruit. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are, in essence, certificates of ownership stored on a blockchain, can also contribute to sustainable development. However, to this point, they have been underutilised. NFTs have inherent capabilities that can make them ideally suited to contribute towards the SDGs. Their unique capacity to validate ownership, identity, claims, and history of events makes them valuable for a variety of purposes. To date, NFTs have been employed primarily for trading digital assets such as collectibles, in-game items, digital art, and event tickets. However, their affordances—the actionable properties NFTs offer to users—make them suitable for use in ways that can significantly affect the health and well-being of humans and the planet. This article provides a framework for linking NFT affordances with the SDGs and examples of how NFT use cases are addressing, or could address, these urgent global needs

The Role of Interdependencies in Blockchain Adoption: The Case of Maritime Trade

Despite its many potential economic and organisational benefits, enterprise blockchain (distributed ledger) technology has still not been widely adopted. From the viewpoint of the participants, the deployment of a blockchain that links collaborating enterprises requires value creation that will exceed investment, including investment in operational and strategic change. The theory behind and practice of cross-enterprise open innovation can inform blockchain adoption. Blockchain implementation requires and creates interdependencies across collaborators, both among enterprise consortium partners and with stakeholders in the broader ecosystem. Distinguished from arm’s-length forms of collaboration, interdependencies occur when organisations intentionally collaborate to become reliant upon one another. In this paper, we develop a framework of blockchain interdependencies and explore key factors that promote or inhibit interdependence. We propose a blockchain collaboration continuum with three levels: cooperation, interdependence, and mutualism. We then explore factors that influence the level of interdependence: two types of consortium-level interdependencies – socio-technical and economic, and two types of ecosystem-level interdependencies – standards and legal/regulatory. We illustrate these interdependencies and their payoffs through the example of supply chains in maritime trade. This work can be used as a starting point for diagnosing critical factors influencing adoption and for illuminating points of leverage that may sway hesitant organisations to participate in blockchain consortia

CSR and the Companies Act, 2013: Be Bold, Take Action

Through the Companies Act, 2013, the Indian government recently made Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities mandatory for companies that, in any of the three preceding financial years, had: (i) net profits of USD 769,000 or more; or (ii) net worth of USD 76.92 million or more; or (iii) turnover of USD 153.84 million or more. These provisions were made effective from the financial year starting 1 April 2014. Dasra's report, Be Bold, Take Action: CSR and the Companies Act, 2013, introduces and explains the regulatory provisions, and guides corporate investors through basic social investment issues to help shape new CSR strategies. It also provides a roadmap to document and expand the impact of CSR spending

Globalization and Environmental Sustainability: An Analysis of the Impact of Globalization Using the Natural Step Framework

Globalization is becoming an increasingly controversial topic as shown by recent protests around the world. To date, however, U.S. business scholars have seldom questioned the basic assumptions of globalization, opting instead to describe the phenomena and focus on best practices. The purpose of this literature review is to broaden the boundaries of the debate on globalization and increase our understanding of its impact beyond the economic sphere into the realm of environmental sustainability. The Natural Step framework is used to organize an analysis of the existing empirical research. It describes four basic system conditions required for sustainability: 1) substances from the earth’s crust must not systematically increase in the ecosphere; 2) substances produced by society must not systematically increase in the ecosphere; 3) the physical basis for productivity and diversity of nature must not be systematically diminished; and 4) for the three previous conditions to be met, there must be fair and efficient use of resources with respect to meeting human needs. This objective review of the literature, which appears to be the first of its kind, revealed contradictory findings in some areas as well as evidence that globalization is an uneven process, which has had both positive and negative effects on the system conditions. The Natural Step framework is a good tool for capturing the benefits and liabilities of globalization from a systemic perspective that includes the major areas in the globalization debate: environmental sustainability, inequality, labor conditions and rights, national sovereignty, and cultural and community impact

How Blockchain and AI Enable Personal Data Privacy and Support Cybersecurity

Recent increases in security breaches and digital surveillance highlight the need for improved privacy and security, particularly over users’ personal data. Advances in cybersecurity and new legislation promise to improve data protection. Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies provide novel opportunities for protecting user data through decentralized identity and other privacy mechanisms. These systems can allow users greater sovereignty through tools that enable them to own and control their own data. Artificial intelligence provides further possibilities for enhancing system and user security, enriching data sets, and supporting improved analytical models

Reciprocity as a foundation of financial economics

This paper argues that the subsistence of the fundamental theorem of contemporary financial mathematics is the ethical concept ‘reciprocity’. The argument is based on identifying an equivalence between the contemporary, and ostensibly ‘value neutral’, Fundamental Theory of Asset Pricing with theories of mathematical probability that emerged in the seventeenth century in the context of the ethical assessment of commercial contracts in a framework of Aristotelian ethics. This observation, the main claim of the paper, is justified on the basis of results from the Ultimatum Game and is analysed within a framework of Pragmatic philosophy. The analysis leads to the explanatory hypothesis that markets are centres of communicative action with reciprocity as a rule of discourse. The purpose of the paper is to reorientate financial economics to emphasise the objectives of cooperation and social cohesion and to this end, we offer specific policy advice

Analyzing Sustainability Impacts

Financial managers need basic models that incorporate the most significant variables, are robust enough to accommodate a wide variety of decisions, and provide results that are simple to communicate. We attempt to help fill this gap by providing a simple and familiar cost-benefit approach that\u27s enhanced and improved through the addition of sustainability outcomes. We developed the cost-benefit tool presented here specifically with the needs of financial managers in mind. It allows them to simultaneously consider the financial and social outcomes of potential decisions without the need for advanced knowledge of sustainability models or methods. The tool is built on a decision-making model that highlights operational and sustainability outcomes. The underlying model is an adaptation of a corporate sustainability model presented in an article by Marc J. Epstein titled Implementing Corporate Sustainability: Measuring and Managing Social and Environmental Impacts, Strategic Finance, January 2008. We developed the tool to highlight the financial impacts of sustainability outcomes and provide a straightforward approach for incorporating them into cost-benefit decisions. The tool can be used for quick, ad hoc decisions made by individual managers, or it can be used as part of a comprehensive analysis of a strategic initiative. Here we provide an example of how the model can be applied to a common, everyday decision many organizations face: whether to alter factor inputs and production processes to reduce negative environmental impacts of the products or services offered

Redefining Quality in Developing World Education

In the outskirts of Medellin, Colombia, impoverished rural schoolchildren have cause for hope. The Colombian Coffee Growers’ Association wants to hire them. Why? Because these children have developed the independent thinking, communication, and work skills that will make them an asset to the industry. They developed these skills in their multigrade primary schools, where children do most of their learning in competence-based groups, while the teacher functions as guide and coach. In Kenya, a teenage boy is also celebrating. A primary school dropout who once survived outside the law, he now runs his own small business, lives on his own, and even helps support his family financially. He learned the skills he needed in a 12-week entrepreneurship program offered to youth living on the streets in the heart of one of Africa’s largest slums. The life-changing economic opportunities now available to these children are the direct result of the unique quality of their schooling, which has had a direct and positive impact on their immediate circumstances. In other words, these children’s schooling was made relevant to their current life experiences and those they will later encounter