Keynote Speakers

Jason Potts is a Distinguished Professor of Economics at RMIT University and Co-director of the Blockchain Innovation Hub at RMIT. He is also a chief investigator on the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His work is broadly centred about the study of the creation and use of new knowledge (i.e. technological change) and its institutional context as the core explanation of long run economic transformation. His work is highly interdisciplinary, extensively collaborative, mixed methods, and draws together several distinct themes about the dynamics of, and interaction between, technological, institutional and cultural change. 

Potts has developed new methods and theories to explain long-run economic transformation and pioneered several new fields of analysis. These include network-theory based approaches to evolutionary economics (for which he won the 2000 Joseph A Schumpeter Prize); Cultural Science (jointly with John Hartley); behavioural innovation economics; the theory of ‘social network markets’, theory of the ‘innovation commons’; and recently ‘institutional cryptoeconomics’.  

He has written 5 books and published over 80 articles on topics including growth theory, creative industries, economics of cities, innovation commons, and recently on crypto- economics and blockchain. 

Potts is an editor of the Journal of Institutional Economics, Vice President of the International Joseph A Schumpeter Society, a Board Member of Australian Digital Commerce Association, and a Fellow of the British Blockchain Association. He is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Australian government’s National Blockchain Roadmap.

Professor Chun-Ping Chang is currently the co-editor-in-chief of Emerging Markets Finance and Trade, a member of the editorial board of Bullutin of Monetary Economics and Banking, a journal affiliated to the Bank of Indonesia; editor-in-chief of Asian Economics Letters; chairman of the Asia-Pacific Society of Applied Economics.  

He is also a professor at the National Sun Yat-Sen University Institute of China and Asia-Pacific Region in Taiwan, the Marketing Management Department of Taiwan Shih University and the Airlangga University in Surabaya, Indonesia.  

Professor Chang has published dozens of articles in Energy Economics, Global Environment Change, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, and six papers are selected as “ESI Highly Cited Papers”. 

Associate Professor Tra Pham is a development economist, who holds a PhD in Economics from University of Groningen (the Netherlands).  Prior to joining RMIT Vietnam in 2013, she held various academic positions in University of Groningen and Vietnam National University and served as a Senior Economist to USAID projects advising the government of Vietnam on international economic policy issues. Her current research interests span financial inclusion, applied economics, economics of innovation and blockchain economy. 

She has built a strong record of publications in high-ranking journals and successfully secured significant external research funding to work on projects relating to financial inclusion and adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies in Vietnam.

Dr Larisa Yarovaya is Associate Professor of Finance, Programme Director of BSc Finance and Financial Technology, and Deputy Head of the Centre for Digital Finance at the Southampton Business School, University of Southampton.

Larisa is a researcher in International Finance and Financial Technologies (Fintech), with specialism in interconnectedness between financial markets. Larisa has published more than 50 papers in top academic journals, such as Journal of Corporate Finance; Journal of Financial Stability; Energy Economics; International Review of Financial Analysis, and European Journal of Finance among others. She also co-edited a book “Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology”, and organises the annual Cryptocurrency Research Conference.

Larisa serves as an Associate Editor in International Review of Financial Analysis; Research in International Business and Finance; and International Review of Economics and Finance. She also serves as a Subject Editor in Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions & Money; and Emerging Markets Review; and Section Editor of the Heliyon Business and Economics and Data-in-Brief Journal. Her research has been featured in BBC, Metro UK, Yahoo Finance, Newsweek, Daily Express, Business Essex, Cosmopolitan and elsewhere.