Michael Rappa is the Alan T. Dickson Distinguished University Professor of Technology Management and founding director of the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University.
Rappa began his teaching career at the University of Minnesota, where he earned his doctorate in 1987. Prior to joining NC State, for nine years he was a professor at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A study published in 2006 in the British journal R&D Management identified Dr. Rappa as a leading scholar in the field of technology management, ranking him in the 99th percentile among 9,335 authors in terms of research productivity in top journals over the past 50 years. Rappa’s research has been selected on three occasions as an outstanding contribution to the field by the Academy of Management, and his pioneering work on Internet business models is one of the most often cited and widely read publications on the subject.
Rappa is perhaps best known as the creator of Managing the Digital Enterprise, an innovative and award-winning educational Web site devoted to the study of management in the digital world. Launched in 1999, originally as the foundation for a course he teaches, the site is now used by over one-quarter million learners and hundreds of instructors from around the world each year.
NC State has recognized Rappa on numerous occasions for his contributions to teaching and service. He is the recipient of the Outstanding Extension Service Award, the Award for Graduate Teaching Excellence, and the Gertrude Cox Award for Innovative Excellence in Teaching and Learning with Technology. He is also winner of the MERLOT Award for Exemplary Online Learning from the Multimedia Education Resource for Learning and Online Teaching; and a three-time winner of the IBM Faculty Award.
Prior to establishing the Institute for Advanced Analytics, Rappa led the development of the university’s interdisciplinary E-Commerce program, and co-founded the Computer Networking graduate degree. An early advocate of open courseware, he established the Open Courseware Laboratory in 1998 to promote the creation of openly accessible educational resources on the Internet. Rappa and a team of his students are credited with creating OpenSeminar, an award-winning open source software platform for hosting collaborative courseware.
Dr. Rappa serves on the board of directors of High Five, a public/private sector partnership dedicated to promoting academic excellence among Triangle-area public high schools. Between 1994 and 1998 Professor Rappa served twice on advisory boards for the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and as a consultant to the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee in Washington, DC.
A devoted admirer of the arts and an active contributor to civic life in North Carolina, Dr. Rappa is a Diamond Society member of the State Employees Combined Campaign and a regular contributor to the North Carolina Symphony, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the North Carolina Zoological Society, the JC Raulston Arboretum, and the Make a Wish Foundation of East Carolina, among other community and charitable organizations.
MICHAEL RAPPA
