Honeywell: “Corporate America Needs to Change Its Mindset”

Honeywell International Inc., a publicly-traded company with an $80 billion market cap, previously announced a blockchain-based marketplace for airplane parts. According to a recent interview with Cointelegraph, they may soon begin recording your home’s carbon footprint on a blockchain ledger as well.

DIY blockchain project

In a Cointelegraph exclusive interview, Lisa Butters, general manager of Honeywell’s GoDirect Trade platform, noted that the company took an unorthodox approach to the adoption of this complex technology:

“About fourteen months ago, we knew nothing about blockchain. Then, I discovered that we have a small group in India, about six developers working on incubating new technology. That is how it started. All development was done in-house and we have been deeply involved with the Hyperledger community ever since.”

Paradoxically, although Honeywell’s GoDirect Trade platform is built on a permissioned Fabric blockchain, “anyone with a Gmail account can sign up and purchase airplane parts”, confirmed Butters.

Since their initial announcement in December 2019, Honeywell has also been working with iTRACE on the authentication of “aerospace products via blockchain”.

Your home’s carbon footprint on the blockchain

Butters believes that blockchain technology can be applied in many other areas as well. One of those areas is carbon emissions. Butters explains:

“Honeywell must report carbon emissions for all of our facilities, we must do those calculations manually. There is an opportunity here. But it doesn’t have to be just for corporations, it could be for your home, some basic calculations, whether it's electric or diesel or gas. That is something we are looking into”.

‘Walled-garden’ approach to data needs to change

Butters believes many corporate blockchain projects fail because they don’t start with a clearly defined use-case:

“Start with a real problem you need to solve. For us, this was a lack of trust — this is a huge $4 billion industry where everything was being done offline because there was no trust between buyers and sellers. We saw this as a great opportunity, the idea was to build something like Carfax for our industry”.

Butters also observes that for Corporate America to embrace this technology, there needs to be a paradigm shift the way it thinks about data:

“The technology makes sense. The reason why it hasn’t become widely accepted is that Corporate America has a ‘walled garden’ approach to data — they need to start sharing data, a huge paradigm shift”.

Perhaps, the global crisis ushered by the coronavirus will serve as a catalyst for change.