Isabell Stamm Receives Volkswagen Foundation Grant for Study on Wealthy Startup Investors

The Volkswagen Foundation is providing around 940,000 euros in funding for a joint research project by Isabell Stamm (MPIfG) and Julia de Groote (WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management). Their project, “The Capital’s Shadow: Wealth Concentration in Startup Ecosystems,” will examine the role of influential investors in shaping the startup scenes in Paris and Berlin. The two researchers are interested in how investment decisions by wealthy actors determine which innovative ideas can flourish and what the consequences are for innovation and openness within startup ecosystems.

The project is one of seven to be funded as part of the Volkswagen Foundation’s “Perspectives on Wealth: Repercussions of Wealth” call, an initiative designed to shift research perspectives away from poverty, the primary focus so far, to the many facets of wealth and their role in social transformation processes. The aim is to contribute to a fuller understanding of wealth and to analyze its effects on a social, cultural, ecological, political, and economic level.

Isabell Stamm has been head of the “Business, Ownership, and Family Wealth” research group at the MPIfG since 2021. She works at the intersection of organizational sociology, economics, and social inequality. Julia de Groote is Merck Finck Assistant Professor at WHU, where she earned her doctorate, and is past chair of the Strategic Interest Group on Family Business Research of the European Academy of Management.