Constanze Victoria Coelsch

Constanze Coelsch-Foisner is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where she works with Fiona Murray. She holds a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Postdoc. Mobility Fellowship and received her PhD in management, technology and economics from ETH Zurich in 2025.

Her research examines how complex capabilities, from new companies to national industrial bases, are decomposed into specialized parts and reassembled by design. Her current work applies this lens to economic statecraft: where the capability to make critical technologies such as semiconductors, fusion energy and advanced materials actually sits, who controls it, and how governments and firms can respond. She combines patent, publication, funding, firm and trade data to study semiconductor supply chains, the industrial base for nuclear fusion, and the technology priorities the United States, the European Union, China and Russia reveal through what they build, buy and deny.

Her doctoral research focused on venture studios, organizations that act as co-founders and recombine ideas, people and resources to create several start-ups in parallel. Drawing on 72 studios across North America, Europe, Africa and Asia, she shows that studios split the work of founding into specialized functions and coordinate them as a firm for producing firms, which reveals the entrepreneurial process to be more decomposable than founder-centric theories imply. Her research is published in the Journal of Business Venturing and MIT Sloan Management Review and was a finalist for the Academy of Management's 2026 Heizer Dissertation Award.

 Coelsch-Foisner works closely with the organizations that act on these questions. She has advised corporations, venture studios and investors, among them Fidelity Labs and Oxford Science Enterprises, on venture strategy. With Fiona Murray, she convened a consortium of leading technical universities at MIT, as well as at ETH for deep-tech translation and investment. Constanze presents her work to academic, industry and policy audiences, from the Academy of Management to SEMICON West and the Swiss and Austrian embassies in Washington.

Two of her most relevant publications are:

Coelsch-Foisner, C., Vandeweghe, L., Clarysse, B., & Murray, F. (2026). Founders for hire? The role of venture studios in breaking the individual-opportunity nexus. Journal of Business Venturing, 41(4), 106600. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2026.106600

Coelsch-Foisner, C., & Murray, F. E. (2026, Spring). Is a venture studio right for your company? MIT Sloan Management Review. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/is-a-venture-studio-right-for-your-co