Opening thoughts from the new Editors

On January 1, 2025, we started our 3-year term as the new co-Editors-in-Chief (co-EiCs) of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM). Launched in 1984, JPIM is now the world's premier innovation management journal. Since its inception, JPIM has been owned by a professional association (the Product Development and Management Association—PDMA), and supported by a global community of innovation management scholars and practitioners. As a team, we have our common roots in this community, which we have served and supported in various capacities over time. We are now excited to lead JPIM through the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. We are grateful to the previous editors, Jelena Spanjol, who has been at the helm for two consecutive terms (2019–2024), Charles Noble (2019–2023), and Gloria Barczak (2023–2024). The professionalism, dedication, and passion with which they have served JPIM and its community certainly set a high bar for us. As the previous editors recall in the last “From the Editors” essay (Spanjol, Noble, & Barczak, 2024), they reconfigured the editorial structure and process and introduced several new initiatives including Catalyst articles, a trailblazer Reviewer Development Program (RDP), Paper Development Workshops (PDWs) for prospective authors, and a redesign of the journal's visual style. JPIM's impact factor increased from 3.78 in 2018 to 10.1 in 2024 under their leadership, with the contribution of world-class authors, associate editors (AEs), and reviewers. We are particularly grateful for the generous time and resources that Jelena and Gloria have committed to assisting us through the editorial transition in the last months. Their knowledge, support, and advice were invaluable. To ensure continuity, Jelena and Gloria will handle all manuscripts that were in process as of December 31, 2024, and will see through manuscripts that they had previously assigned to one of the AEs from their team until a final decision is reached. In the remainder of this editorial, we will: (1) set our vision for the role of JPIM given the current grand challenges; (2) describe our editorial structure and process; (3) share our strategy and new initiatives to sustain JPIM's impact and growth; (4) introduce important new guidelines on Generative AI and data sharing; and (5) present our plans for engagement and dissemination of JPIM articles within and beyond academia. As we write this essay, the future and prosperity of communities in every corner of the earth are threatened by a series of severe and interconnected grand challenges: wars, climate change, poverty, health, well-being, and social crises. Mitigating or reversing their negative consequences requires innovations in products, technologies, business models, organizational forms, systems, and policies. As JPIM editors, we cannot ignore the role of innovation management (research) in the collective effort to enable current and future generations and the natural environment to survive and thrive. Crossing disciplinary boundaries has been part of JPIM's DNA from the very beginning.1 We are loyal to this vision and want to reaffirm JPIM's position as the home for interdisciplinary and collaborative research between social scientists, engineers, computer scientists, health scientists, and natural scientists focused on common innovation management problems that matter to society. JPIM is driving the field by defining new and forward-looking paths for innovation management research such as ‘liquid’ innovation, the implications of Generative AI for innovation management (research), the prevalence of sustainable business model innovation, and the growing need to break away from the traditional profit-driven market-value logics to embrace new forms of responsible and public value innovation (Spanjol, Noble, Baer, et al., 2024; Spanjol, Noble, & Barczak, 2024). In summary, our mission is to continue strengthening JPIM's position as a global top-tier research journal for cutting-edge, interdisciplinary, socially impactful, and ethically conducted research in the field of innovation management. As a team of co-EiCs, we will work closely together and share the same duties and responsibilities. We believe that the strength of the JPIM community lies in the rich diversity of its members' expertise, backgrounds, and skills. We reflect this diversity in the unique composition of the Co-EiCs team, which, for the first time in JPIM history, is distributed across three continents. In keeping with this value, we made a deliberate effort to assemble a gender-balanced team of AEs, which consists of 22 distinguished innovation management researchers, representing different geographies (Asia, Australasia, Europe, North America), disciplines (e.g., design, entrepreneurship, marketing, management, organization, strategy, technology), backgrounds, world views, research philosophies, and methodological orientations. We will have two dedicated AEs for our RDP, which will continue to offer a route for early career innovation scholars from around the world to join the community as reviewers. We thank all our AEs for stepping into this role and look forward to working with this remarkable group of colleagues. We also reviewed the composition of the Editorial Review Board (ERB) to ensure a balanced representation of the JPIM community and the right mix of expertise. The full list of JPIM editorial roles is available on the journal's website. We maintained the review process workflow introduced by Spanjol and Noble during their first term as JPIM editors (see Figure 1). Specifically, we will oversee desk rejections, allocation of reviewers, and straight rejection decisions after the first round of reviews. We will assign promising manuscripts to one of the AEs, who will process the paper from that point onward, making a recommendation to us at every iteration of the review process. While maintaining the existing review process workflow, we aim to shorten the review cycle by reducing the time for major revisions from 6 to 4 months and minor revisions from 4 to 2 months. This will improve the “time to market” for JPIM articles, which we see as very important for an innovation management journal. As a norm, we aim to reach a final decision within two review rounds. Following the practice of the previous editors, editorial support for JPIM will be co-located with one of the Co-EiCs at Cardiff University. We sincerely thank Zuzana Schneiderova for her excellent work and dedication over the last 6 years. We aim to sustain the growth trajectory JPIM followed over the last four decades. High-impact factors are the result of high-quality manuscripts being cited by a wide range of scholars. In this section, we focus on our new initiatives to attract high-quality manuscripts to the journal. We cover the important issue of dissemination later in the essay. The first route to nurture and attract high-quality research will be to invest time and resources in organizing and running more PDWs. PDWs have already been hosted by previous editors; we will intensify this activity by working with our AEs, leading innovation scholars, conference organizers, other journal editors, and institutions to host more PDWs in different parts of the world. We strategically selected AEs who can add value to the review process with their expert guidance, while simultaneously acting as boundary spanners between the journal and a range of academic communities. We plan to achieve this through several types of events, such as co-hosting PDWs in partnership with AEs respective institutions. We have identified potential hosts in the US, Europe, Asia, and Australasia and will be announcing a roadmap for PDWs events later in 2025. To support these efforts, we will complement the pool of AEs and ERB members by establishing an Advisory Board comprising a small group of highly accomplished scholars and practitioners, who will provide insights and advice on strategic issues and future directions. These Advisory Board members will also assist us in our efforts to further promote the journal among academics and practitioners. As a further way to attract high-quality research, we will continue to actively support the JPIM Research Forum and IPDMC conference, which are the core annual events for our community and an important source for JPIM's pipeline. There will be dedicated ‘Special Sections’ in JPIM attached to these two conferences. To tap into new and emerging talents, we will also continue to support the PDMA Doctoral Consortium, PDMA Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Competition, and IPDMC Doctoral Workshop. In addition, we plan to leverage our geographical distribution to actively represent JPIM in other key conferences and forums where innovation management work is presented and debated. We will continue to welcome Special Issue (SI) proposals on emerging topics to increase JPIM's impact on the field. Emerging topics are increasingly dynamic and often involve cross-disciplinary collaboration. We welcome innovation management research topics that particularly address grand challenges and the unique future research directions highlighted by Spanjol, Noble, Baer, et al. (2024). We retain the SI proposal submission process introduced by previous editors and aim to publish two topical SIs annually. As a significant innovation in JPIM's manuscript portfolio, we introduce a new article category: JPIM Review. JPIM Review will be a regular section within JPIM featuring articles that provide a synthesis and critical appraisal of a particular research stream within innovation management, next to highlighting important directions for future research inquiries and distilling implications for managerial practice. Proposals for JPIM Review articles should be submitted to the EiCs, who will decide whether to invite the author(s) to develop the proposal into a full manuscript. This new category of articles will replace Virtual Issues. Unlike Virtual Issues, JPIM Review articles will provide a synthesis of relevant research that goes beyond articles published in JPIM. We will reposition the Catalyst category by emphasizing the novelty dimension. Going forward, this article category will be a regular section of JPIM dedicated fully to essays intended to spark and catalyze new thinking. We are specifically interested in novel interpretive reflections and prospections from both academics and practitioners on a variety of innovation management themes and methods. This category aims to publish essays that are interesting and provocative and do not necessarily conform to conventional wisdom. Hence, JPIM Catalyst articles seek to generate new debates and discussions on innovation management. The essays can be subjective in nature but should be rooted in experience or past scholarship. Proposals for JPIM Catalyst articles should be submitted to the EiCs, who will decide whether to invite the author(s) to develop the proposal into a full manuscript. In recent times, there have been mounting concerns within the research community about dishonest and unethical practices, such as paper mills, inappropriate use of Generative AI to produce manuscripts, and lack of transparency and rigor in data collection and analysis. We will be highly vigilant about these issues. As a first step, we introduce additional and more specific guidelines on the use of Generative AI and data-sharing requirements. The current position of JPIM in relation to the use of AI by Authors is as follows (Spanjol & Noble, 2023): (1) Authorship: JPIM does not permit generative AI technologies and tools to be listed as authors on submissions. (2) Disclosure: If authors use generative AI technologies in preparing a manuscript, JPIM requires a disclosure statement (see below) to be included within the cover letter and a dedicated appendix (to be used for editorial and review purposes and which may be published online upon acceptance). The dedicated appendix should include information such as prompts provided to LLMs, output generated and used, etc., and be uploaded as a separate document into the submission system. JPIM follows Wiley's policy to exclude the reporting of tools and technologies (including services provided by human editors) used “to improve spelling, grammar, and general editing”. Disclosure Statement “In preparing this manuscript, the author(s) used the following [GENERATIVE AI TECHNOLOGIES/TOOLS] in order to [REASON/S]. The specific content generated by these AI technologies/tools in the manuscript is clearly marked and described in a dedicated appendix, to be used for editorial and review purposes. Prior to submission, the author(s) reviewed the content generated and take(s) full responsibility for the content of the submitted manuscript.” To these guidelines, we added an explicit statement about the use of generative AI by editors and reviewers, which was absent in the previous version. Our guidelines for reviewers and editors are based on Wiley's guidelines on publication ethics (https://authorservices.wiley.com/ethics-guidelines/index.html#22): The peer review process is a human endeavor and responsibility and accountability for submitting a peer review report, in line with a journal's editorial polices and peer review model, sits with those individuals who have accepted an invitation from a journal to undertake the peer review of a submitted manuscript. This process should not be delegated to a GenAI tool. Editors or peer reviewers should not upload manuscripts (or any parts of manuscripts including figures and tables) into GenAI tools or services. GenAI tools may be used only on a limited basis in connection with peer review. A GenAI tool can be used by an editor or peer reviewer to improve the quality of the written feedback in a peer review report. This use must be transparently declared upon submission of the peer review report to the manuscript's handling editor. We also want to formalize JPIM's expectations regarding data-sharing and transparency. So far, like other comparator journals, JPIM has encouraged data sharing but has not produced a set of specific guidelines on the matter. Building on the Transparency Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines and Wiley's data-sharing policy, as of January 1, 2025, we adopted the following guidelines: JPIM will publish papers where authors indicate whether the data, methods used in the analysis and materials used to conduct the research will be made available to any researcher for purposes of reproducing the results or replicating the procedure. Authors must, in a specific data availability statement, indicate if they will or will not make their data, analytic methods, and study materials available to other researchers. If an author agrees to make materials available, the author must specify where that material will be available. The above guidelines correspond to Level 1 of the TOP guidelines (https://osf.io/9f6gx/wiki/Guidelines/) and Wiley's “Expect Data Sharing” policy (https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Authors/open-access/data-sharing-citation/data-sharing-policy.html). In essence, data sharing is optional, but the inclusion of a data availability statement is mandatory. The authors of accepted manuscripts will be required to provide a “data availability statement” that confirms the presence or absence of shared data. Data sharing includes but is not limited to raw data, processed data, software, algorithms, protocols, methods, and materials. If data are shared, the authors must provide details about the data repository used. A selection of data availability statement templates and suitable data repositories will be available for the authors of accepted papers. We are aware that the landscape of Generative AI and data transparency in the academic publication sector will change as technology evolves and new policies are developed. We believe that no journal can take a strong stance in isolation from others; therefore, we will seek to cooperate with editors and publishers of comparable journals to keep JPIM abreast of these developments. We will also work with the PDMA Publications Committee and our Advisory Board to turn these guidelines into formal policies in due course. To promote JPIM content to our key audiences and break through the increasing volume of academic publications that compete for attention, we strategically focus on a series of opportunities. First, we will continue to leverage the resources and opportunities provided by PDMA, which owns JPIM. Specifically, JPIM will be a platform for dialogue between academic researchers, practitioners, and policymakers via its articles, the JPIM's annual research forum, and other innovation conferences and events that bring these different communities together. We will continue to promote articles via PDMA/JPIM's official channels and take further advantage of other formats (e.g., podcasts and videos) to appeal to a wider scope of audience. Likewise, we will encourage and support authors who want to go the extra mile and disseminate the findings of their published research through mainstream channels (e.g., theconversation.com, industry and policy outlets, and digital media). Finally, we will engage highly visible thought leaders among practitioners and policymakers in a dialogue with the journal (through written contributions and digital media), as well as encourage non-academic experts to write Catalyst articles (see above), sharing their thought-provoking insights related to innovation management. For all of the above initiatives, we will benefit from the insights and advice of our AEs and Advisory Board members. A journal is only as good as the community of people who constitute it. As Co-EiCs of JPIM, we want to have a positive impact on the journal itself and on the environment within which it operates. In the words of JPIM's founder Tom Hustad, “By working together we can create a future where we are even more proud of what we are responsible for having accomplished than we now are” (Hustad, 2013, p. 91). We are grateful for the opportunity and support (past, present, and future) provided by the JPIM community. We look forward to publishing original research that advances the field of innovation management, benefits educators and students, influences practice, and helps make the world a better place. The authors have read and agreed to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) international standards for authors. Luigi M. De Luca is Professor of Marketing and Innovation at Cardiff research on the impact of digital technologies and innovation on public value and sustainable through the of and institutions. work focused on strategy, new and their organizational published in several leading academic journals including Journal of Product Innovation Journal of Journal of the of Marketing Research and Journal of Research among is a Professor and of at the of research, often in with industry on the management of entrepreneurship, and and in these next to publishing academic articles and has published in leading academic journals such as of Management Journal of and Journal of Product Innovation among of her recent publications is a on leadership, published by has served as for Journal of Product Innovation Management in the is Professor of Marketing and the of the Innovation and Research at University. publications in journals such as the Journal of Product Innovation Journal of the of Marketing Journal of Journal of Research in among previously served as for the JPIM and started its Reviewer Development from as the for the Product Development Management has also with such as among on & and work has several of for is of The of Marketing and Professor of Marketing at University. a from University. is also a in and to of and of work in journals such as Journal of Journal of the of Marketing Journal of Research in and Journal of Product Innovation research on strategy and innovation management. the PDMA Dissertation Proposal in and the JPIM Research Forum in and