Innovation ecosystems often face challenges such as inadequate coordination, insufficient protection of intellectual property, limited access to quality expertise, and inefficient matchmaking between innovators and experts. This paper provides an in-depth design analysis of SPARK-IT, a novel business innovation platform specifically addressing these challenges. The platform leverages advanced AI to precisely match innovators with suitable mentors, supported by a distributed web scraper that constructs expert profiles from reliable sources (e.g., LinkedIn and BrainMap). Data privacy and security are prioritized through robust encryption that restricts sensitive content exclusively to innovators and mentors, preventing unauthorized access even by platform administrators. Additionally, documents are stored encrypted on decentralized storage, with their cryptographic hashes anchored on blockchain to ensure transparency, traceability, non-repudiation, and immutability. To incentivize active participation, SPARK-IT utilizes a dual-token approach comprising reward and reputation tokens. The reward tokens, SparkCoins, are wrapped stablecoins with tangible monetary value, enabling seamless internal transactions and external exchanges. Finally, the paper discusses key design challenges and critical architectural trade-offs and evaluates the socio-economic impacts of implementing this innovative solution.

This paper presents the design and implementation of a blockchain-secured system for monitoring driver sobriety and real-time geolocation. The proposed platform integrates a Modular Sensor Battery (MSB) for detecting alcohol concentration in exhaled air, a centralized Data Collection Platform (DC Platform) for real-time data visualization and storage, and a complementary physiological monitoring device—the IoT Fit-Bit Smart Band (IFSB)—which captures heart rate and blood oxygen saturation as alternative indicators when breath-based sensing may be compromised. The MSB, the DC Platform, integration with the IoT FitBit Smart Band, and the blockchain-based data management architecture represent the authors’ direct contribution to both the conceptual design and technical implementation. These elements are introduced as part of a unified, fully integrated system designed to enable non-invasive sobriety monitoring and secure data integrity in vehicular contexts. To ensure data authenticity, a custom Ethereum smart contract stores cryptographic hashes of sensor readings, enabling decentralized, tamper-evident verification without exposing sensitive medical information. The system was validated in a controlled experimental environment, confirming its operational robustness and demonstrating its potential to improve road safety through secure, real-time sobriety detection and geolocation tracking.

The field of blockchain technology is continuously expanding and attracting more research interest. Blockchain promises decentralization, transparency, traceability, and resistance to censorship, all of which have prompted a heightened adoption in a wide range of sectors. We analyzed 57,116 papers published between 2022 and 2025 to determine how the field evolved after Ethereum’s 2022 transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake, a period not covered by earlier field-wide analyses. Using VOSviewer for keyword and co-authorship mapping, together with a thematic evolution analysis and a term-level trend analysis, we answer four research questions. Q1: What are the research trends in blockchain? Q2: Which countries and institutions have contributed the most to the area of blockchain research? Q3: What are the most important journals and conferences in the field of blockchain based on the number of citations? Q4: What have been the most cited works of the scientific community? The analysis shows that topics associated with earlier blockchain infrastructure, such as distributed ledgers, proof of work, and cryptocurrencies, have become less prominent, while topics such as federated learning, differential privacy, and zero-knowledge proofs have gained increasing attention. India, China, and the United States account for the highest publication output, while reviews and surveys dominate the most cited works. Beyond the bibliometric findings, this paper contributes a normalization script, developed to cluster the keywords and generate a VOSviewer thesaurus file.