Special issue guest editorial: “Advancing broad and deep understanding in innovation management: Meta‐analyses and literature reviews”

While the "glamorous" part of extending a research field is often focused on breaking new ground through explicating new constructs and empirical relationships, just as important is the need to solidify our understanding of what we think we know from past research.A clear grasp of this foundation is essential if we are to look forward to new insights.Reflective review research can take many forms, including thematic literature surveys, bibliometric analyses, systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and others.The Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) has a strong history of these types of articles (see Spanjol et al., 2024, for a listing of selected review articles published in JPIM).With new streams emerging across a range of subfields in innovation management research (e.g., artificial intelligence, business model innovation, corporate entrepreneurship, digital technology, and others), the time is right for a curated reflection on where we stand and future research opportunities in these and other areas.This project began with a call for papers in the spring of 2021.Using an optional paper proposal process, we invited interested authors to send us short form summaries of their ideas for this issue and receive comments and suggestions.That seemed to be quite successful in quickly stimulating interest in the special issue and getting authors to put pen to paper.To start laying out ideas for many of the papers that you will see here (nine total 1 ), authors submitted such proposals for feedback from the special issue editors.While not all of these proposals resulted in papers in this issue, all did receive extensive feedback from multiple members of the editorial team.We do believe this feedback was valuable regardless of the ultimate disposition of the paper, and we encourage authors to pursue such opportunities when given the chance around a special issue.We believe there is particular value in receiving commentary over a short form summary of a paper rather than its full 50-page incarnation.This lets the review team focus on the core contribution of a piece, which is typically the reason for its ultimate acceptance or rejection at any journal.The deadline for submissions