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Michael Rappa is the founder and director of the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University, and the originator of the Master of Science in Analytics — the first such degree program of its kind in the nation. Rappa began his teaching career at the University of Minnesota, where he earned his doctorate in 1987. Prior to joining NC State as the Alan T. Dickson Distinguished University Professor in 1998, for nine years he was a member of the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A study published in 2006 in the British journal R&D Management identified Rappa as a leading scholar in the field of technology management, ranking him in the 99th percentile among over 9,000 authors in terms of research productivity in top journals over the past 50 years. His research has been selected by the Academy of Management on three occasions as an outstanding contribution to the field, and his pioneering work on 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 taught, the site is a valued resource used by several million learners and hundreds of university instructors from around the world.
Prior to establishing the Institute and conceiving the Master of Science in Analytics, Rappa led the development of the university’s interdisciplinary E-Commerce program, and helped establish the Computer Networking degree and served as its management area coordinator. An early advocate of open courseware, he established the Open Courseware Lab in 1998 to promote the creation of openly accessible educational resources on the Web. Rappa and a team of his students are credited with creating OpenSeminar, an award-winning open source platform for hosting collaborative courseware.
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. Rappa was twice named by the editors of R&D Management as a finalist for the Epton Prize.
Rappa served on the board of directors of High Five, a public/private sector partnership dedicated to promoting academic excellence among Triangle-area public high schools from 2004 to 2009. Between 1994 and 1998 he 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.
In addition to his usual duties at NC State, Dr. Rappa currently serves as General Co-Chair of the 19th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2010), to be held in Raleigh, North Carolina from April 26-30, 2010.