"The Most Helpful and Inexpensive Assistance you Could Possibly Get."
Carl J. Schramm
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President and chief executive officer of the Kauffman Foundation since 2002, Carl Schramm is one of the world’s most recognized thought leaders on fostering and advancing entrepreneurship. The Economist has hailed Schramm as the "evangelist of entrepreneurship," and USA Today noted, "On every front, the Kauffman Foundation has worked intelligently to promote and sustain entrepreneurs – in the fields of entrepreneurship education, research, policy, economic development, and access to capital." Schramm is the author of The Entrepreneurial Imperative (HarperCollins, 2006). He is also coauthor of Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, with Robert Litan and William Baumol (Yale University Press, 2007), which is now available in nine languages and was named in 2008 one of the “Top Ten Books That Drive Debate” by the National Chamber Foundation, an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Both books are regarded as emerging classics, providing new insight into the American and international economies.
Appointed in 2007 by then-U.S. Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez, Schramm served as chairperson of the Department of Commerce’s Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economic Advisory Committee, which released its report in January 2008. In 2009, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsian Loong appointed Schramm to the Research, Innovation, and Enterprise Council, which aims to steer Singapore's drive to become a knowledge-based, innovation-driven economy.
An entrepreneur himself, who brings a variety of experiences in business, public policy and academia, Schramm has developed a unique perspective on the financial power of entrepreneurs and how public policies encouraging entrepreneurship can cultivate more dynamic economic growth. Under his leadership, the Kauffman Foundation has developed innovative programs that: expose students to the power of entrepreneurship, open new pathways to effectively move university innovations into the marketplace, create better-qualified angel investors as a critical source of seed capital for entrepreneurs, and engage economists of the highest caliber to study the impact of entrepreneurship. Schramm has been instrumental in the development of a partnership with the U.S. Department of Commerce to create an international entrepreneurship resource at www.entrepreneurship.gov and also spearheaded the Foundation’s sponsorship of the first-ever Global Entrepreneurship Week, which he announced in November 2007 with UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Schramm has also led Kauffman in the development of an international entrepreneurship fellowship program, which is funded by other governments, including the United Kingdom and Denmark, for aspiring entrepreneurs.
Before joining the Foundation, Schramm enjoyed a successful career in the health care industry. He was a cofounder of HCIA, Inc. and Patient Choice Health Care, and he founded Greenspring Advisors, a consulting and merchant banking firm in the health information and risk management industries. Schramm also served as executive vice president of Fortis (now Assurant) and as president of its health insurance operations. While there, he developed several innovations, including transition coverage for recent college graduates.
Trained both as an economist and lawyer, Schramm began his career on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University and emerged as a respected thinker in health care finance, regulation, and insurance. He founded the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Care Finance and Management in 1980, the first such research center in the nation. While at Hopkins, he led the country’s only post-doctoral training program in health finance, sponsored by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In 1987, he chaired the American Assembly on Health Care Costs and edited its volume, Health Care and Its Costs. He left Johns Hopkins to head the Health Insurance Association of America, which developed a number of industry-wide innovations in health insurance.
Besides many leading academic journals, Schramm’s work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Newsweek. He is a contributing editor of Inc. magazine. In addition to his graduate fellowships (New York State Regents and Ford Foundation), Schramm received two consecutive NIH Career Scientist Awards and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow at the National Academy of Science, Institute of Medicine. He is a Batten Fellow at the Darden School of the University of Virginia, a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He received the George Eastman Medal from the University of Rochester in 2005.
