Forty years in the making: A systematic review of the megatrends literature

Four decades ago, the concept of megatrends was introduced by John Naisbitt (1929-2021). The popular tool has since been adopted by researchers, consultants, private enterprises and governments to explore long-term futures across a diverse range of regions, industries and socioeconomic domains. The widespread use of megatrends has led to variability in how the concept is applied and a lack of scientific rigour around the approach, and previous attempts to synthesise the megatrends literature have been incomplete. The current paper presents the first systematic review of megatrends publications from 1982 to 2022, including a bibliometric analysis of publishing trends. We provide a consensus view of how the concept has been defined and applied in academic and non-academic literature and propose a standardised process for improving the scientific rigour of megatrend analyses. From an analysis of 267 studies, we present a novel diagnostic tool for defining megatrends that brings together the consensus characteristics of megatrends (e.g., its multidisciplinary nature, drivers of change, breadth, long time span and forward-focused lens). Our findings also reveal validity and reliability issues associated with megatrend studies, and from this, we present a standardised approach for developing and validating megatrends that improves upon these shortcomings.