About Journal of Product Innovation Management

Journal of Product Innovation Management

Journal of Product Innovation Management, universally shortened to JPIM, is a bimonthly, peer-reviewed academic journal for the study of innovation management and new product and service development. Its print ISSN is 0737-6782 and its online ISSN is 1540-5885, the pair recorded on this JournalsWorld record and confirmed by the OpenAlex source record resolved through the ISSN endpoint for this profile. Published since 1984 by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), the journal sits at the meeting point of marketing, management, strategy and engineering, and it is one of the longest-established specialist outlets for research on how organisations create, develop and launch new products and services. According to the Journal Citation Reports figures reported for the journal, its 2025 impact factor is 12.0, a figure that places it near the very top of its business, management and industrial engineering categories.

This profile is anchored to the JournalsWorld record itself: post 1563, slug journal-of-product-innovation-management, title Journal of Product Innovation Management, with stored ISSNs 07376782 and 15405885. Figures below are attributed to the source that reported them, and anything that could not be verified from a fetched source is described in those terms rather than filled in by guesswork.

Quick Facts

Identity and History

JPIM was founded in 1984, when product development was still widely treated as an engineering activity that happened inside research and development departments, rather than as a cross-functional management discipline in its own right. The journal's history tracks the professionalisation of that discipline. Its sponsoring body, the Product Development and Management Association, is the professional community for product development practitioners, and the journal has always addressed two audiences at once: scholars building theory about innovation, and managers whose decisions the theory is meant to improve. That dual address is visible in the journal's own statement of purpose, which speaks of advancing both theoretical and managerial knowledge.

Over four decades the subject matter has widened with the field itself. Early product innovation research concentrated on manufactured goods, stage-based development processes and the factors that separated successful launches from failed ones. The journal's pages now also carry work on service innovation, digital products and platforms, business model innovation, sustainable and circular product design, innovation ecosystems, and the organisational and policy conditions that shape whether new offerings reach a market at all. The constants are the object of study, the innovation process and its management, and the standard of evidence, which has risen steadily as the field's methods have matured.

The journal's bibliographic identity is stable and easy to verify, which matters in a field where conference proceedings and similarly titled outlets can cause confusion. The print ISSN 0737-6782 belongs to the print edition that began in 1984, and the online ISSN 1540-5885 belongs to the electronic edition delivered through Wiley Online Library, whose journal address is built on that online ISSN. OpenAlex records the same ISSN pair, the same start year, and the PDMA as the associated society, and it records an alternate short title, Product Innovation Management, which is a reminder to searchers to check both forms when tracing older citations.

Scope and Subjects

The journal describes itself as an interdisciplinary, international journal that seeks to advance theoretical and managerial knowledge of innovation management and product development. It publishes original articles about organisations of all sizes, from start-ups and small and medium-sized enterprises to large corporations, and from the consumer, business-to-business and policy domains. It is receptive to quantitative and qualitative methodologies alike, and to conceptual articles. Authors from across the world, and from diverse disciplines and functional perspectives, are explicitly welcomed.

In practice, that scope divides into recognisable territories. One territory is the development process itself: idea generation and evaluation, concept testing, design and development, launch, and the cross-functional teamwork that carries a product through those stages. A second is innovation strategy: portfolio decisions, platform thinking, technology roadmapping, and the choice between incremental improvement and radical change. A third is the organisation of innovation: culture, leadership, incentives, structures, and the capabilities that let a firm innovate repeatedly rather than once. A fourth covers the market side: customer involvement, user innovation, market learning, branding of new products, and adoption and diffusion. A fifth, growing territory covers innovation in services, digital offerings and ecosystems, open innovation and collaboration between firms, and sustainability-driven innovation. A sixth covers methods and measurement: how innovation success is defined, how development performance is measured, and how research designs in this field can be made stronger.

The journal's older aims statement, preserved in publisher material, adds a flavour that still describes its taste in papers. It aims to bring readers the theoretical structures and practical techniques that let them work at the leading edge of practice; it takes a multifunctional, multidisciplinary and international approach; it draws on academics, consultants, practising managers, economists, scientists, lawyers and sociologists; and it explicitly invites innovative and even provocative viewpoints and essays that stimulate the field. A purely local case description with no general lesson, a technical engineering paper with no management question, or a marketing paper in which the product is not new in any meaningful sense will each struggle at this journal, not because they are poor work, but because the innovation-management question that defines JPIM is missing from them.

Article Types and Methods

JPIM publishes original research articles as its core content, together with conceptual articles that build or reorganise theory, and review and essay contributions that take stock of, or argue with, the field. The journal's declared openness to method is real and consequential. Quantitative work in the journal includes survey research, archival and panel studies, experiments and simulation. Qualitative work includes case studies, interview-based process research and ethnographic accounts of development work as it actually happens. Conceptual work is expected to do more than summarise: it should propose structure, name mechanisms, and give future empirical work something testable to hold on to.

That methodological pluralism raises the bar in a specific way. A survey study must defend its constructs and its sample against a readership that knows innovation surveys well. A case study must show why its sites were chosen, how its evidence was triangulated, and what general claim a reader is entitled to take away. An experiment must connect its task to a real development decision. Reviewers at a journal of this standing read methods as scholars of the field, not as generalists, and the most common reason strong topics fail is that the design cannot carry the claim the authors want to make.

Editorial Leadership and Peer Review

The journal's reference entry consulted for this profile lists its current editors-in-chief as Luigi de Luca, Gerda Gemser, Minu Kumar and Ruby Lee, a team whose combined expertise spans innovation management, design, marketing and strategy, which mirrors the journal's interdisciplinary address. Editorial teams at long-running journals change over time, and earlier listings naming other editors, including Jelena Spanjol and Charles H. Noble, describe previous phases of the journal's leadership; authors should confirm the current team on the journal's Wiley page at the time they submit. Day-to-day handling is by editors with subject expertise in the manuscript's territory, supported by an editorial review community drawn from the innovation research field.

Peer review at JPIM is the full, demanding review expected of a leading field journal. Manuscripts are first assessed for fit and contribution: whether the paper addresses an innovation management or product development question, whether it speaks to the conversations the journal's readers are actually having, and whether its contribution is clear enough to state in a sentence or two. Papers that pass that screen go to expert reviewers, whose reports typically address theory, design, evidence and managerial meaning together. Authors should expect revision rounds that ask for real work, clearer theory, additional analysis, stronger robustness checks or a redesigned framing, rather than cosmetic changes. The journal's standing means its acceptance bar is high and its desk-rejection rate is correspondingly real; the earlier JournalsWorld template described the venue as highly demanding and advised submitting only a team's strongest work, and nothing fetched for this profile contradicts that advice.

Metrics, Read With Their Sources

The headline metric reported for JPIM is its Journal Citation Reports impact factor. The journal's reference entry, citing Journal Citation Reports, gives a 2025 impact factor of 12.0, ranking the journal 3rd out of 69 journals in the Engineering, Industrial category, 10th out of 323 in Business, and 11th out of 426 in Management. Those category positions explain the journal's reputation more honestly than the single number does: very few journals are simultaneously near the top of an engineering list and two large social-science lists, because very few journals are genuinely read in all three communities.

OpenAlex tells the longer story. Resolved through the ISSN endpoint for 0737-6782 to source S93630570 at checking time, OpenAlex reported 3,943 indexed works since 1984, cited 232,376 times in total, with an h-index of 243, an i10-index of 1,701 and a two-year mean citedness of about 6.73. Its three largest topic areas for the journal were innovation and knowledge management, business strategies and innovation, and product development and customisation, which is an accurate map of the journal's centre of gravity. OpenAlex figures describe the whole indexed back file and change as the database updates, so they are a snapshot at checking time, not fixed properties.

SCImago-derived listings classify the journal in the first quartile in its categories, including Management of Technology and Innovation, Strategy and Management, and Engineering in its general category, and the original JournalsWorld record likewise treated the journal as a first-quartile title. Different aggregator sites quote different SCImago Journal Rank values for different years, so this profile reports the quartile standing, which is consistent across the sources fetched, rather than a single SJR number tied to one year. The journal is also recorded in OpenAlex's listing data as holding an A-star grade in the Australian Business Deans Council list and class A standing in the Italian ANVUR list, which is the kind of detail that matters to authors whose institutions work from named journal lists.

Indexing and Recognition

JPIM is indexed in Scopus, and its Journal Citation Reports presence, with category rankings in Engineering Industrial, Business and Management, shows its place in the Web of Science citation indexes for the social sciences and engineering. OpenAlex described the source as a core source in its data at checking time. For most authors the practical questions are institutional: whether the journal appears on their school's list, at what grade, and whether a publication there counts for review, tenure or accreditation purposes. On the evidence fetched, the journal's grades on the major business-school lists are at or near the top of those scales, but grades are revised periodically and the current list used by the author's own institution is the only version that governs their case.

Access, Charges and Open Access Choices

JPIM is primarily a subscription journal. OpenAlex recorded 645 of its 3,943 indexed works as open access at checking time, which is the pattern of a journal in which most content sits behind subscription access while a growing minority is made open by author choice, funder requirement or institutional agreement. Authors who need their article to be open access should use the optional open access route offered through the publisher and should check whether their institution holds an agreement with Wiley that covers the charge, since such agreements change and are institution-specific.

On the charge itself, OpenAlex listed the journal's article processing charge at 3,400 US dollars for 2025, with listed figures of 3,240 dollars for 2024 and 3,090 dollars for 2023. The earlier JournalsWorld template for this record quoted a listed charge of 4,108 dollars, which could not be reconciled with the OpenAlex listing fetched for this profile. Because the sources differ, this profile does not present a single charge as settled fact: the governing figure is the one shown in Wiley's own author services workflow for this journal at the moment of acceptance, and authors with a funder mandate should confirm both the amount and the licence offered before they commit. No DOAJ listing is claimed for this journal in this profile; a DOAJ search carried out for this profile did not return a record for the journal's ISSNs, and in line with careful practice that result is reported as a listing that could not be verified, not as proof of anything further.

How to Submit

Start on the journal's Wiley Online Library page, whose address is built on the online ISSN 1540-5885, and read the current author guidelines there, including the journal's expectations for manuscript preparation, data and supplementary material, and its policies on prior dissemination and overlapping submissions. Frame the manuscript for this journal before you write the first paragraph: name the innovation management or product development question, state the contribution in relation to the JPIM conversations it joins, and make the managerial meaning of the findings explicit without letting it crowd out the theory. Choose the method that can actually answer the question, and report it to the standard of the best recent examples in the journal. Prepare for a long and serious review process by stress-testing the paper first: give it to a colleague outside the project and ask them to state its contribution back to you, check that every construct is measured or evidenced as claimed, and remove any analysis that does not serve the central claim. Submit through the submission system linked from the journal page, and keep the confirmation and manuscript number from that system as your record.

Who Should Consider This Journal

JPIM suits research teams with a genuinely new answer to a recognised innovation question: a mechanism of development success that prior work had not isolated, evidence that reverses or qualifies a received practice such as a stage-based process or a particular form of customer involvement, a theory that reorganises a fragmented corner of the field, or a method that lets the field measure something it previously described loosely. It suits work that speaks to managers without simplifying, and work that respects managers' reality without abandoning rigour. It is a poor use of a team's time for a descriptive single-company story with no general claim, for a replication with no new insight, or for a paper whose real home is a functional discipline and whose innovation content is a setting rather than a subject. Such papers are often good papers; they simply belong where their actual question is the central one.

Similar and Neighbouring Journals

Authors comparing venues for innovation research commonly also weigh Research Policy for innovation studies with a policy and economics emphasis, Technovation for technology and innovation management, the Journal of Business Venturing for entrepreneurship-centred innovation work, Strategic Management Journal for innovation questions framed as strategy, Academy of Management Journal for organisation-level theory into which innovation often enters, and specialist product and design outlets for narrower communities. These are reader comparisons, not a ranking, and no metrics for those titles are stated here. The practical test is to read the last two years of each candidate journal and ask where a paper like yours has recently been published well, and where its natural citers already read.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of the Journal of Product Innovation Management? Print ISSN 0737-6782 and online ISSN 1540-5885. Both are recorded on this JournalsWorld record and in the OpenAlex source record for the journal.

Who publishes JPIM? Wiley-Blackwell publishes the journal on behalf of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), the professional association for product development, whose connection to the journal is also recorded by OpenAlex.

When was the journal founded and how often does it appear? It has been published since 1984 and appears bimonthly.

What is its impact factor? A 2025 impact factor of 12.0 is reported from Journal Citation Reports, with category positions of 3rd in Engineering Industrial, 10th in Business and 11th in Management. Always check the current Journal Citation Reports release for the latest figure.

Is JPIM open access? It is primarily a subscription journal with an optional open access route. OpenAlex listed a 2025 processing charge of 3,400 US dollars for that route, while older directory text quoted a different figure, so confirm the live charge and any institutional agreement with the publisher before relying on either number.

What subjects fit the journal? Innovation management and product and service development in organisations of every size and sector, including process, strategy, organisation, market and sustainability questions, studied quantitatively, qualitatively or conceptually.

How demanding is review? The journal is a leading field outlet with a high bar for contribution and method. Expect an initial fit assessment, expert review and substantive revision requests, and submit work that is finished rather than promising.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile was built from the journal's aims and scope statement as carried in publisher and journal listing material, the journal's reference entry reporting its Journal Citation Reports figures and publication details, the OpenAlex source record S93630570 resolved through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint at checking time, and a DOAJ search carried out for the journal's ISSNs. Where sources differed, on the open access charge, the difference is stated in the text. An acceptance rate for the journal could not be verified from the sources fetched and is therefore not stated here.