One of the world’s leading experts on entrepreneurship, innovation and economic growth, Carl Schramm, will teach at the Graduate School of Management in spring 2013 thanks to a recent gift from the Arthur & Carlyse Ciocca Charitable Foundation.

Schramm, former president and chief executive officer of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, is the inaugural holder of the Arthur and Carlyse Ciocca Visiting Professorship in Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Named the “evangelist of entrepreneurship” by The Economist, Schramm is a serial entrepreneur who has played important roles in advancing entrepreneurial capitalism globally. He co-authored a new, best-selling book, Better Capitalism: Renewing the Entrepreneurial Strength of the American Economy (2012) with Robert Litan.

Schramm co-founded Startup America Partnership in conjunction with the Obama Administration, chaired the U.S. Department of Commerce’s panel on measuring American innovation during the Bush Administration, and served as a consultant to several foreign governments. In 2005, he and Gordon Brown—then Chancellor of the Exchequer and, later, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom—co-founded Global Entrepreneurship Week, which is now celebrated in 170 countries.

Under Schramm’s leadership, the Kauffman foundation became a unique global resource devoted to advancing entrepreneurship through innovative programs, grantee partnerships, policy research and advocacy. Additionally, he implemented several programs designed to increase business formation among minority populations and advanced the foundation’s pioneering work to improve the transfer of intellectual property from universities to commercial application.

Additionally, Schramm has created or co-founded five companies, one of which provided the statistical standards used to measure creditworthiness for a large segment of the public sector bond market. He also started the nation’s first academic center to study health care costs and was an executive vice president at Fortis—one of the world’s largest insurance companies—where he devised the first college-to-career health insurance product.

Schramm was recently named a University Professor at Syracuse University and writes for the George W. Bush Institute’s “Bush Center Blog.”  His column, “Messy Capitalism” appears in Forbes magazine.  His writing has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs magazine, City Journal magazine and the Harvard Business Review. He has appeared many times on television as a guest of the PBS “Charlie Rose” program; CNBC’s “Street Signs” program with Brian Sullivan, and “Squawk Box” program with Joe Kernen; and Fox Business’ “After the Bell” program with David Asman and Liz Claman, and “The Willis Report” program with Gerri Willis.

Early in his career, Schramm served on the faculty of The Johns Hopkins University where he established the first academic research center focused on health care financing. While at Hopkins, he co-founded HCIA, a publicly traded data company that improved hospital financial performance, enhanced clinical quality, and established the quantitative basis for evaluating hospital creditworthiness. After leaving Hopkins, he served as CEO of HIAA, now America’s Health Insurance Plans. He also was executive vice President of fortis, an international insurance holding company, and subsequently founded Greenspring Advisors, a merchant banking company. Schramm was of counsel to the Hogan and Hartson (now Hogan Lovells) for four years. He chaired the Maryland Health Services Cost Review Commission and served as a member of the Maryland Health and Higher Education Financing Authority.

Schramm currently is working on the potential of remodeling underdeveloped economies by introducing entrepreneurial ecosystems as a means of accelerating development.  He established the foundation for this work in two articles in Foreign Affairs, the most recent of which, “Expeditionary Economics: Spurring Growth After Conflicts and Disasters”
(2010) has engendered a nascent new field of research. Over 50 scholarly papers subsequently have appeared. In a related vein, Schramm continues to work on
“preventive defense,” examining the nature of international economic conflict. 

His work also includes research on urban dynamics, exploring how cities can be made more conducive to indigenous entrepreneurship. In addition, he is working with Professor
Eugene Fitzgerald of MIT to research a new theory of corporate innovation. Initial work in this area appeared in 2011 in a volume entitled Inside Real Innovation, co-authored with Fitzgerald and Andreas Wankerl. Schramm also had contributed to the body of scholarly work on philanthropy with the 2004 publication of The Social Utility of Private Foundation, one of the first papers in the nascent field of critical philanthropic studies.

Schramm’s work has been recognized with five honorary doctorates and the 2006 award of the George Eastman Medal from the University of Rochester. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, and a fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine.  He also serves as a visiting scientist at MIT and a Batten Fellow in the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia, and is a Fellow at the George W. Bush Library and Institute.

Earlier in his career Schramm received two consecutive five year Career Scientist Awards from NIH. He was also a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow at the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences. He was a New York State Regents Graduate Fellow and a Ford Foundation Doctoral Fellow. During his career at Hopkins, Schramm had 24 post-doctoral students.

Schramm graduated from LeMoyne College and received his graduate training in labor economics and industrial relations at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He earned his law degree at Georgetown University.