This study aims to examine how scholarly discourse and technological innovation around the metaverse have developed in tourism and hospitality. This study compares academic publications and granted patents to identify where research and innovation align, diverge and temporally precede one another.
This study analyses 4,102 Scopus-indexed publications and 729 globally granted patents from 2020 to 2024. Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modelling is used to identify thematic structures, while curve similarity measures and Granger-causality tests are used to examine temporal alignment and predictive precedence between publication and patent topics.
The analysis identifies 12 topics grouped into three broad clusters: enabling technologies and infrastructure, immersive experience and adoption dynamics and governance, application and contextual deployment. Patents are concentrated in deep learning, recommender systems, spatial reconstruction and hardware architectures, whereas publications focus more strongly on user experience, behavioural adoption, governance, sustainability and socio-cultural implications. Temporal results reveal topic-specific technology-push, research-pull and bidirectional patterns, indicating selective rather than uniform science-technology coevolution.
This study contributes a dual-lens topic modelling and patent-based account of metaverse innovation. This study advances socio-technical systems theory by showing that metaverse development follows differentiated, asynchronous and topic-contingent pathways rather than a single linear trajectory from research to innovation or from technology to scholarship.
