Technological Scanning for Corporate Foresight: The case of Metaverse applications for healthcare

The process of Corporate Foresight (CF), which allows companies to build scenarios and inform the creation and sustainment of their competitive advantage, relies on the integration of several steps. Scanning is a crucial step of CF, as it informs and influences the results of the whole process and, thus, the strategic decision-making of the company. Sources and methods of scanning for CF analysis can be diverse and lead to different results, although few studies investigate such differences: more specifically, the informative power of academic and non-academic articles and reports has not been assessed yet. This study aims at shedding novel light on how the different analysis methods of (i) full reading of records, (ii) bibliometric analysis, and (iii) text mining analysis, gather forces of change differently, based on the source analyzed. The study’s empirical context is the metaverse and its application in healthcare. We find that each source and method by itself is unable to fully gather the whole set of forces of change; however, each source presents some topics that are specific to the target readers of the source, and each methodology presents some limitations. From the comparison of the results, theoretical and managerial implications are drawn.