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 several occasions as an outstanding contribution to the field, 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 to millions of students from around the world 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. Rappa served as general co-chair of the 19th International World Wide Web Conference in 2010.

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 was twice named a finalist for the Epton Prize by the editors of R&D Management.

Prior to founding the Institute, Rappa led the university’s interdisciplinary E-Commerce curriculum and helped to establish the Computer Networking degree program, serving as its management area coordinator. An early advocate of open courseware, he established the Open Courseware Lab in 1998 to promote openly accessible educational resources on the Web. Rappa and a team of his students created OpenSeminar, an award-winning open source platform for hosting collaborative courseware.

Rappa began his academic career at the University of Minnesota, where he earned his doctorate in 1987.