Innovation in the forest sector is a growing research interest and within this field, there is a growing attention for institutional, policy and societal dimensions and particular when it comes to the question of how to support innovativeness in the sector. This Special Issue therefore focuses on governance aspects, relating to and bridging business and political-institutional-societal levels. This includes social/societal factors, goals and implications that have recently been studied under the label of social innovation. Furthermore, the emergence of bioeconomy as a paradigm and policy goal has become a driver for a variety of innovation processes on company and institutional levels. Our article provides a tentative definition of “innovation governance” and attempts a state-of-art review of innovation governance research in the forest sector. For structuring the research field, we propose to distinguish between organizational/managerial, policy or innovation studies. For the forestry sector, specifically, we suggest to distinguish between studies focusing on (i) innovative governance of forest management and forest goods and services; on (ii) the governance of innovation processes as such, or (iii) on specific (transformational) approaches that may be derived from combined goals such as innovation governance for sustainability, regional development, or a bioeconomy. Studies in the forest sector are picking up new trends from innovation research that increasingly include the role of societal changes and various stakeholders such as civil society organizations and users. They also include public-private partnership models or participatory governance. We finally should not only look in how far research approaches from outside are applied in the sector but we believe that the sector could contribute much more to our general scientific knowledge on ways for a societal transformation to sustainability.

林业部门的创新是一个日益增长的研究兴趣，在该领域内，人们越来越关注制度、政策和社会层面，尤其是在涉及如何支持该部门创新的问题时。因此，本期特刊重点关注与商业和政治-机构-社会层面相关和衔接的治理方面。这包括最近在社会创新标签下研究的社会/社会因素、目标和影响。此外，生物经济作为范式和政策目标的出现已成为公司和机构层面各种创新过程的驱动力。我们的文章提供了“创新治理”的暂定定义，并尝试对林业部门的创新治理研究进行最先进的审查。为了构建研究领域，我们建议区分组织/管理、政策或创新研究。具体而言，对于林业部门，我们建议区分侧重于 (i) 森林管理和森林产品和服务的创新治理的研究；(ii) 创新过程的治理，或 (iii) 可能源自综合目标的特定（转型）方法，例如可持续性、区域发展或生物经济的创新治理。林业部门的研究正在从创新研究中汲取新趋势，其中越来越多地包括社会变革和各种利益相关者（如民间社会组织和用户）的作用。它们还包括公私伙伴关系模式或参与式治理。