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." Most recently, U.S. Secretary of
Commerce Carlos Gutierrez appointed Schramm as chairperson of the Department of
Commerce's Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economic Advisory
Committee. Schramm's recent books, Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, with Robert
Litan and William Baumol (Yale University Press, 2007) and The Entrepreneurial
Imperative (HarperCollins, 2006), are regarded as emerging classics, providing
new insight into the American and international economies.
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 also has been instrumental in the development of
the Foundation's international entrepreneurship fellowship program, which is
funded by the UK government for aspiring British entrepreneurs. As a result of
its thought leadership and its work, business leaders and government officials
from around the world now look to Kauffman for leadership in helping them make
entrepreneurship a part of their long-term economic development agendas.
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.
Reshaping the Way Big Business Does Business: Surviving (and Thriving) in
Entrepreneurial Capitalism
Carl Schramm writes and speaks frequently on the subject of entrepreneurial
firms and larger-scale, established businesses. He uses his most recent book,
The Entrepreneurial Imperative (HarperCollins, 2006) as a basis for this talk.
Schramm discusses the coming of America's new economic model, entrepreneurial
capitalism, which is displacing our country's old model of industrial
capitalism. The implications of this transformation for big firms are
startling and far-reaching, just as they are for individuals working in the
economy.
Dr. Schramm proposes the very nature of corporate America is changing. In
order for big firms to survive in an increasingly, entrepreneurial economy,
they will have to embrace a real entrepreneurial culture. This keynote is
filled with leading edge insights on how corporations can embrace the changes
necessary to propel them into the age of Entrepreneurial Capitalism.
