About DeTrust Lab

DeTrust Research Lab
We aim to enhance the trust and credibility of corporate sustainability strategy, our research lab sets out to introduce a novel concept—decentralized trust—that revolutionizes the way that corporates authenticate their sustainability strategies through the non-transferable non-fungible tokens that are verified by multiple stakeholders, including social movement organizations. In general, the DeTrust project aims for a scientific breakthrough with an ambition of creating a Decentralized-Trust-Based Autonomous Sustainability Governance Framework—a co-determined distributed trust, where social movement organizations, environmentalists, firms, and communities come together bottom-up, as emergent properties of each other to develop an autonomous governance network for the structure of collaborative sustainability strategies. Emergent properties in this research refer to properties that manifest themselves as the result of various trust mechanisms working together, not as a property of any individual trust component. Thus, decentralized trust as well explains how multiple stakeholders could coordinate collaborative sustainability strategies in a transparent and autonomous way. In this sense, each stakeholder will have the ability to decompose property rights to match features of business model innovation and create even richer incentives to work with collaborative sustainability strategies digitally, which are transparent, controlled by multiple stakeholders, and not influenced by a central government. The success of the DeTrust project will contribute directly to the research on the pseudonymous economy and decentralized identity, as well as shed light on the direction of decentralized society. This research may contribute to the creation of soft law in sustainable development between corporates, social movement organizations, non-governmental organizations, and intergovernmental organizations.
- Objective 1: Develop a theoretical model for decentralized trust
- Objective 2: Develop a stable multivariable modeling system for decentralized trust
- Objective 3: Develop a decentralized-trust-based autonomous sustainability governance framework
Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Dr. Teck Ming Tan
Dr. Teck Ming Tan, Docent ([email protected]) holds D.Sc. (Marketing) from the University of Oulu, Oulu Business School (AACSB), Finland. He is an Associate Professor at the Oulu Business School. He is appointed as an Adjunct Professor (Docent) in the marketing field at the University of Helsinki.
His research interests include blockchain, branding, sharing economy, sustainability, and social movement. He is an external advisor at the Helsinki Blockchain Center. He is also the Oulu city representative of the International Token Standardization Association (ITSA) based in Berlin, Germany. He has been invited as a speaker/panelist at various international seminars, podcasts, and interviews related to the blockchain marketing, including from the BI Norwegian Business School (Norway), Kaleva newspaper (Finland), Mid Sweden University (Sweden), ANSA magazine (Italy), Cologne International Business School (Germany), INTI International University (Malaysia), University of Naples Frederico II (Italy), and University of South Florida (USA).
His blockchain marketing research has been published in Financial times-ranked journals, including the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and the Journal of Business Ethics. He also published in the Journal of Business Research, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, Electronic Commerce Research, NA–Advances in Consumer Research, and others.
In 2023, he will be a visiting scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University from August to December 2023, to explore how blockchain technology in social movements changes corporations’ ethical strategies and the global image of the company. He also initiates a blockchain marketing course entitled “Marketing Research in the Sharing Economy: Platform Businesses, Blockchain, and the Metaverse” at the Finnish Doctoral Program in Business Studies (KATAJA) that is to be held from 4th to 6th April 2023 at the Oulu Business School, Finland.
Collaborators

