DATA ANALYTICS SPEAKER SERIES

Blockchain and the Transformation of Business

THURS, SEP 12TH, 2019

When: 12pm - 1pm
Where: UNC Charlotte Center City Building (320 E 9th St, Charlotte, NC 28202).

Lunch: A brown bag lunch may be brought in or Einstein’s Bagels is located in the lobby of Center City.
Parking: Parking will not be covered. We recommend using the 7th street parking deck. The pay to park lots near the building are full during week days. Parking is very limited in the area and we suggest that you walk, take the lightrail or carpool if possible. Please refrain from parking in UNCC's parking lots, as you could be ticketed.

For more information on the Center City Building, visit centercity.uncc.edu.

MEET THE SPEAKER

Sunil Erevelles, PhD

Associate Professor of Marketing at UNC Charlotte

Dr. Erevelles is on the faculty at the Belk College of Business at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He served as Chair of the Department of Marketing from 2010-2018. Prior to that, he was on the faculty of marketing and the Marketing Area Coordinator at the Anderson School of Management, University of California, Riverside. He received his PhD in business from The Ohio State University. His research has been published in various leading academic journals, including the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Business Research and Industrial Marketing Management. He has won numerous awards for his research and teaching. He has delivered seminars to senior managers, as well as to senior government officials in almost every part of the world, including North America, Latin America, Europe, Australia, Asia and Africa.

PRESENTATION TOPIC

Blockchain and the Transformation of Business

by Dr. Sunil Erevelles

“The blockchain is one of the most fundamental inventions in the history of computer science.” -Marc Andreessen, co-founder, Netscape

We are at the start of a new revolution in business. Just like the creation of the World-Wide-Web in 1991 ignited the extensive use of the Internet in business, the introduction of a decentralized digital currency called Bitcoin in 2008 may have opened the doors to a much broader seminal paradigm for the creation and transfer of value in business. The foundation of this paradigm is the blockchain. While many currently view it as the technology behind cryptocurrencies, it’s greatest value is likely to be as a transformational enabler of business activity.

It has been suggested that blockchain will introduce a fundamental paradigm shift in the basis of economic activity with “the fall of Big Data and the rise of the blockchain economy (Gilder 2018).” Others have proposed that blockchain is “the biggest invention since the emergence of the Internet” (Drescher 2017) and that “the very structure of society is about to change” (Wester 2018). Still others have suggested that “the technology likely to have the greatest impact on the future of the world economy has arrived…and it’s called the blockchain” (Tapscott and Tapscott 2018). In this seminar, Dr. Erevelles will explain what blockchain is, and describe how it is likely to transform the world.

FROM THE EVENT