Carl Schramm

Batten Fellow

Carl J. Schramm, president and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and a Batten Fellow, is recognized around the world as a champion of entrepreneurship. At the Kauffman Foundation, where he's been since 2002, he has developed numerous initiatives to foster entrepreneurship both in the United States and around the world. These include educating young people about entrepreneurship, exploring policies to help transfer innovations from university laboratories to the marketplace, educating and training seed-stage investors, and studying the economic impact of entrepreneurial activity.

He has been a prolific writer and speaker on the power of entrepreneurship as well as other business and economic issues. In 2003, during his time at the Darden School, Schramm spoke to the Darden and UVA community on the "High Price of Low Ethics." He also contributed an article to the Batten Briefings, in which he called for a national dialogue on the ways in which public and private policy can facilitate technology transfer both for the research institutions supplying innovations and for the entrepreneurs hoping to commercialize them.

In 2004, Schramm spoke out in an influential article published in Foreign Affairs, in which he describes the disappointing results of the "Washington consensus"-the approach by which the U.S. has encouraged other nations to adopt the features and institutions of American capitalism. He then lays out a model that captures the dynamics of the entrepreneurial dimension of the U.S. economy-mostly ignored by the Washington consensus-and proposes using that model to inform policies for promoting entrepreneurship in developing regions.

Schramm's books include The Entrepreneurial Imperative (HarperCollins, 2006) and Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, with coauthors with Robert Litan and William Baumol (Yale University Press, 2007), which has been translated into eight languages and is regarded as an emerging classic. His next book, Better Capitalism, coauthored with Litan, is forthcoming from Yale University Press. In the July/August 2008 issue of The American, Schramm and Litan, Kauffman's vice president for research and policy, lay out some of the themes from their book. The challenges facing the United States, they write, can be addressed through rapid economic growth-achieved through innovation. "What all of us, regardless of our political affiliation, should want in our next presidents and in our other governmental officials," they argue, "is an understanding of the need to promote policies that will best foster the entrepreneurial spirit that drives radical innovation."

Schramm, who holds degrees in economics and law, was himself an entrepreneur. He founded Greenspring Advisors, a merchant banking firm that supports business development in health care and insurance. He also founded HCIA, the nation's largest provider of data to the health care industry and now a division of Soluscient, and he was a cofounder and vice chairman of the board of Patient Choice Health Care in Minneapolis.