Carl Schramm named University Professor

SU Vice Chancellor and Provost Eric F. Spina today announced the appointment of Carl J. Schramm as University Professor. An internationally recognized leader in entrepreneurship, innovation and economic growth, Schramm comes to Syracuse following a decade as president of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. He is the 16th person in SU history to hold the title of University Professor. Under his leadership, the Kauffman Foundation grew into a global institution, becoming the largest private funder of economic research related to growth and innovation. Schramm initiated many efforts in education, spearheading the Kauffman Campus Program at 17 universities and establishing the first charter school in the United States to be owned by a grant-making foundation.

“The University’s vision of working across sectors to encourage entrepreneurship and the formation of new firms as a means of revitalizing the local community is unique,” Schramm says. “I am excited to work with colleagues who are engaged in what I believe to be one of the most important experiments under way in the United States.”

Schramm—who has conducted extensive research and written widely on the link between entrepreneurship and economic development—will teach an honors seminar examining the entrepreneurial history and evolving economy of New York’s upstate cities.

“Carl Schramm is recognized worldwide as one of the foremost figures in entrepreneurship,” says Spina. “As a University Professor, he will be superbly positioned to bring his long, successful track record as a scholar, teacher, mentor and leader to bear on generating new synergies across our already strong, University-wide initiatives connected to entrepreneurship.”

Most recently, Schramm was named a Growth Fellow at the George W. Bush Institute’s 4% Growth Project. He also co-founded the Obama administration’s Start Up America initiative, a private-sector alliance intended to dramatically increase the development, prevalence and success of innovative, high-growth U.S. firms. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Schramm currently advises government leaders worldwide on how to promote job growth and economic expansion, and writes and speaks widely on the power of entrepreneurship. He is a Batten Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and serves as a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His new book with Robert E. Litan, “Better Capitalism,” a practical blueprint to restore the vigor of the American economy, will be published by Yale University Press later this year.

In 2010, Schramm published an influential article in Foreign Affairs that opened a new area of economic inquiry denominated “expeditionary economics,” which describes an approach to rebuilding economies in the wake of conflict and natural disasters. Subsequently, more than 50 academic papers and government documents have been published in this new field, and expeditionary economics now is a course offering in a number of academic institutions, including the United States Military Academy, the Center for Complex Operations at the National Defense University and the Command and General Staff College.

“Carl is a consummate catalyst,” says SU Chancellor and President Nancy Cantor. “From his early work on the economics of health care, to launching startups, to advising U.S. presidents, to leading the Kauffman Foundation’s efforts to seed the entrepreneurial spirit nationally and globally, he has used scholarship as a fulcrum to make a difference in the world. As he brings his unparalleled experience back to his hometown, we know he’ll have a deep and broad impact at SU and all of its connected communities.”

An entrepreneur himself, as well as economist and lawyer, Schramm founded and co-founded several successful companies in the health care, finance and information technology industries, including HCIA, Inc., Patient Choice Health Care and Greenspring Advisors. In 2007, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez tapped Schramm to chair the Department of Commerce’s Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economic Advisory Committee.

Among Schramm’s books are “Health Care and Its Costs” (W.W. Norton for the American Assembly, 1987); “The Entrepreneurial Imperative” (Harper Collins, 2006); “Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism” (Yale, 2007), with the economists William Baumol and Robert Litan, and now published in 10 languages; and “Inside Real Innovation” (World Scientific, 2010). “The Entrepreneurial Imperative” and “Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism” illustrate how less-developed nations can accelerate growth through entrepreneurship, while urging the United States itself to reinvigorate its own commitment to small business as the force that made it the world’s leading economy.

Schramm was a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University, where he founded the first research center on health care costs in the nation. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and held a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellowship at the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.

Schramm holds a doctorate in labor economics and industrial relations from the University of Wisconsin, where he was both a Ford Foundation doctoral fellow and a New York State Regents Graduate fellow. He also holds a law degree from Georgetown University, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Le Moyne College. He was the 2005 recipient of the University of Rochester’s George Eastman Medal, and in May 2012 received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Syracuse University.