Guest editorial

Interorganizational learning: where are we now and where is the research taking us?The motivation for opening the call for papers for this special issue came from the increase in scholarly attention toand growth in societal relevance of interorganizational learning.The argument is that interorganizational learning is increasingly becoming a relevant theme because of its potential: it is recognized to create opportunities and outcomes that individual organizations cannot leverage and achieve by themselves (Bruneel et al., 2010;Peronard and Brix, 2019).This potential is relevant not only for private organizations (van Winkelen, 2010;Holmqvist, 2004;Argote, 2011;Martins, 2016) but also because of global tendencies such as the increase in collective impact projects (Kania and Kramer, 2011), the increased awareness of living up to the sustainable development goals (Dzhengiz, 2020), and the increase in co-production activities stemming from the Collaborative Governance wave (Bevir, 2013; Brandsen et al., 2018;Mortensen et al., 2020).Studying the organizing around the processes of exploration and exploitation and the roles required by the people taking part in this "two-level-game" is hence more important than ever (Beeby and Booth, 2000;Holmqvist, 2004; Jones and MacPherson, 2006;Mariotti, 2012;Brix, 2019) just like the increase in attention towards co-exploration and co-exploitation brings out new complexities that need to be better understood (Brix et al., 2021).Guest editing this special issue has therefore also been a very interesting, insightful process with many paper proposals that all in different ways have shed new light on the field of interorganizational learning and its connection to organizational learning.So to provide an answer to the question posed in the title of this editorial, "where are we now and where is research taking us," I will continue to introduce to you the seven papers in this issue.