Tools in Entrepreneurship: How to Design, Evaluate, and Publish Them in High-Impact Journals

Tools such as canvases, AI-based applications, and conceptual frameworks play a vital role in entrepreneurship and innovation. Influential tools in entrepreneurship, such as the Lean Startup heuristic, the Business Model Canvas, and the Lean Canvas, have become essential to entrepreneurship education, startup programs, and venture development at business schools and universities worldwide. While these tools have long shaped entrepreneurial practice, scholarly research has only recently turned systematic attention toward their design, evaluation, and theoretical grounding. This raises important questions about how such tools should be designed, how they should be rigorously validated, and how they can be published in high-impact journals. This panel symposium on ‘Tools in Entrepreneurship’ offers an interactive discussion forum for scholars to explore these questions collectively, thereby also seeking to stimulate creation of new tools that help to translate the rich knowledge that exists in academia into practitioner-friendly formats. It brings together editors and experienced entrepreneurship and innovation scholars to address three core themes: 1) How to design tools in entrepreneurship and innovation, 2) how to validate and evaluate them, and 3) how to publish them in high impact journals. Each panelist will set the stage by giving a short opening statement. This will be followed by an interactive Q&A and structured discussions to deepen engagement and foster collaborative learning.