Blockchain-enabled Smart Contracts and the Internet of Things: Advancing the research agenda through a narrative review

The combination of blockchain-enabled smart contracts and the Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging research area with a potential for far-reaching impact on our daily lives. While existing literature reviews explore current and future research states, most do not investigate the intellectual foundation. This study is a database-assisted narrative review of the smart contract and IoT combination using the TCM (Theme-Context-Method) framework that explores the past, present, and future. By reviewing 227 relevant peer-reviewed articles across 69 Scopus-listed journals, the authors profile the existing research, identify the foundational roots of literature, review the current state of research, and identify implications for research, practice, and society. The origins of the literature include themes such as decentralised data management, service orchestration, and distributed trust management. Themes in current research include the convergence of blockchain and the IoT, security, and privacy. Open research directions along the technology-legal-organisational triad, such as interoperability, dispute resolution, and skill gap assessment, have also been elucidated. This study synthesises extant literature to serve as a foundation for future academic research and practitioner exploration. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024.