Vítězslav Sommer works as a researcher and deputy director at the Institute for Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He focuses on the economic and social history of Czechoslovakia after 1945. He is currently working on a standard project for the Czech Science Foundation entitled Deindustrializace a nový ekonomický řád. Regionální ekonomika a zlínský obuvnický průmysl mezi centrálním plánováním a tržním hospodářstvím (Deindustrialisation and the New Economic Order: The Regional Economy and the Zlín Footwear Industry between Central Planning and a Market Economy). This research analyses the economic transformation of the Zlín region in the 1980s and 1990s in connection with the decline of the local footwear industry and in the context of the economic transformation after 1989. It examines both the history of the footwear industry and the activities of major regional companies and their impact on the transformation of the regional economy during the period under review. The research takes into account both the longer economic history of the region and Czechoslovakia (Baťa's industrialisation, nationalisation after 1945, the economic situation during the so-called normalisation) and the global context of the partial deindustrialisation of developed industrial economies in the last third of the 20th century.

His project, Od bot k mikročipům (From Shoes to Microchips), is part of Matchmaking.