Tools in entrepreneurship: moving from craft towards technology

Tools for entrepreneurs, such as canvases, templates, and decision heuristics, are central to entrepreneurial practice, yet they remain undertheorized as designed artifacts. In this Special Issue introduction we argue that tools for entrepreneurs should be treated as objects of systematic scholarly inquiry on their own right, drawing on the design science tradition established in fields such as Information Systems research. We define tools in entrepreneurship by their form-function specificity and distinguish them from prescriptive theories and normative frameworks. We outline three streams of design knowledge: Tools-for-Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship-as-Design, and Policy-Design-for-Entrepreneurship, and propose a framework that distinguishes individual tools (L1) from designed workflows (L2) and situated implementations from design principles and design theory. We close with a call for papers for the Special Issue.