Carl Schramm, Ph.D., J.D.

Carl J. Schramm is an internationally recognized leader in entrepreneurship, innovation and economic growth. He joined the Syracuse University faculty in 2012, following a decade as president of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. He is the 16th person in the University’s history to be appointed as University Professor.

An economist, he served on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health from 1973 to 1986. While at Hopkins he founded the nation’s first academic research center to focus on public policy in hospital finance. He was instrumental in designing Maryland’s all-payer reimbursement system and chaired the commission that oversaw its implementation. His research helped to rationalize hospital capital markets and to clarify anti-trust policy in the hospital industry. Subsequently, serving five years as president of the Health Insurance Association of America (now America’s Health Insurance Plans), he led the industry’s efforts to provide a private sector solution for the uninsured. Schramm later served as president of Fortis Healthcare and EVP of Fortis (now Assurant), an insurance holding company. In 1995 he founded Greenspring Advisors, a consultancy and business incubator.

Schramm was appointed CEO of the Kauffman Foundation in 2002. Under his leadership, Kauffman became the nation’s largest private funder of research related to entrepreneurship, economic growth and innovation. As part of this effort, Kauffman created the first empirical measures of startups in the US economy. With UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, he initiated Global Entrepreneurship Week, now celebrated in 170 countries. Schramm led Kauffman’s efforts to establish campus-wide entrepreneurship cultures in 17 American universities. The Kauffman Academy, the first charter school in the United States to be operated by a major foundation, was established during his presidency.

In 2007, Schramm chaired the Department of Commerce’s Advisory Committee on Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economy. In 2011 President Obama appointed him co-chair of the public/private partnership efforts of Startup America. In the academic years 2013 and 2014, Schramm served as the inaugural Arthur and Carlyse Ciocca Visiting Professor of Innovation at the University of California Davis. He currently serves as an elected member of the Government University Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR) of the National Academies of Sciences, and Chairs the Technical Advisory Board of Apple’s Global Programming Academy at the University of Naples. Professor Schramm is a trustee of the Templeton World Charities Foundation. He also serves on the COVID Commission Planning Group.

An entrepreneur himself, he founded and co-founded several successful companies in the health care finance and information technology industries, including HCIA and Patient Choice Healthcare. Schramm has chaired the board of Lumeon, a London-based software company that supports clients in the UK and US with a unique healthcare orchestration platform. He serves on the board of Digestiva.

Professor Schramm’s books include Burn the Business Plan (Simon & Schuster, 2018); Better Capitalism, with Robert Litan (Yale, 2012); Inside Real Innovation, with Eugene Fitzgerald and Andreas Wankerl (World Scientific, 2010); Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, with William Baumol and Robert Litan (Yale, 2007); The Entrepreneurial Imperative (Harper Collins, 2006); and Health Care and Its Costs (American Assembly, 1987). He is a frequent contributor to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal and Real Clear Politics. His 2010 article in Foreign Affairs initiated the field of expeditionary economics.

Schramm holds a Ph.D. from Wisconsin (1973) and a law degree from Georgetown (1978). At Hopkins he held two consecutive NIH career scientist awards and was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow at the National Academies of Sciences. He served five years of counsel at Hogan and Hartson (now Hogan Lovells). Professor Schramm holds five honorary doctorates, the University of Rochester’s George Eastman medal, and the National Italian American Foundation’s Leonardo da Vinci Prize. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Batten fellow at the University of Virginia.