This Special Issue focuses on entrepreneurial leadership, an area which is very much in its infancy. Even though leadership has been a major topic of research in psychology and management for about a century many of its concepts and debates have not yet been adopted in entrepreneurship and small business management. As a field entrepreneurial leadership is evolving, lacks definitional clarity and has not yet developed appropriate tools to assess its characteristics and behaviours. The conceptual and empirical papers in this Special Issue address some of these limitations by consolidating existing embryonic theory development, stimulating new conceptual thinking and highlighting unanswered questions and opportunities for further research.