Arun Rai

• Ph.D., Kent State University
• MBA, Clarion University of Pennsylvania
• M.S., Birla Institute of Technology & Science

• Digital Innovation and Transformation
• Managing Artificial Intelligence
• Platform Business Models and Ecosystems
• Design and Use of Information Systems
• Governance of Digital Resources
• Economic, Behavioral, and Societal Impacts of Digital Technologies

Arun Rai is Regents’ Professor and holds the Howard S. Starks Distinguished Chair at the Robinson College of Business (RCB) at Georgia State University. He is the Director and co-founder of RCB’s Center for Digital Innovation (previously, Center for Process Innovation), an interdisciplinary research center on digital innovation that leverages industry-university collaborations. He has held visiting appointments at universities in Australia, France, Germany, Hong Kong, and Slovenia. He is a Fellow of the Association for Information Systems and a Distinguished Fellow of the INFORMS Information Systems Society and received the Association for Information Systems LEO Award for Lifetime Exceptional Achievement in the Information Systems discipline.

Arun’s research has investigated the development and deployment of information systems to drive innovation and create value. The investigations have been in a variety of high-stake problem domains in business and society: from hi-tech firms to supply chains to platform ecosystems to online communities to rural areas of developing countries. The research has contributed to understanding of the design, use, and impacts of information systems; digital transformation of organizations and supply chains; governance of IT resources, online collectives, and digital platforms; and deployment of digital innovations to address societal problems including poverty, health disparities, infant mortality, and digital inequality.

His research has involved close engagement with organizations across sectors and countries (e.g., Apollo Hospitals, China Mobile, Emory Healthcare, Gartner, Georgia-Pacific, Grady Hospital, IBM, Intel, SAP, SunTrust, UPS), and has been sponsored by government agencies, corporations and thought leadership forums. He has published extensively in the top journals in IS, Management/Decision Science, Operations Management, Marketing, Healthcare, and other disciplines. He is ranked among the top scholars for publications in premier IS journals. His work has received several best paper awards and has been extensively cited in IS and other disciplines (e.g., Accounting, Marketing, Operations, Strategic Management, Computer Science, Education, Healthcare, Psychology).

Arun has played leadership roles in developing interdisciplinary research initiatives and curricula at the interstice of IS with strategy, operations, artificial intelligence, and analytics. He has taught courses on digital strategy and innovation, intelligent systems, supply chains, technology and operations, theory development, and research methods, and his teaching has spanned the BS, MBA, EMBA, MS, EDBA, and Ph.D. programs. He has chaired over 30 Ph.D. dissertations and served as a committee member for over another thirty. Several of his former Ph.D. students hold chaired professorships and are in leadership positions at their institutions and in the profession (e.g., Ph.D. directors, department chairs, associate deans, editors). He has developed and delivered highly successful non-degree executive education programs for major corporations (e.g., the Global Supply Chain Solutions Program for UPS during the company’s digital transformation from transportation services to supply chain solutions) and workshops (e.g., theory development, research methods, digital innovation, AI) for academic audiences across the world.

In terms of internal service, Arun is Director and co-founder of the Center for Digital Innovation and serves as its Ph.D. Director. The Center has developed to be a leading interdisciplinary research center on digital innovation. He served three consecutive 3-year terms as RCB’s Promotion and Tenure Committee Chair and has served on several key university, college and unit committees.

In terms of external service, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the MIS Quarterly (MISQ) from 2016 to 2020. He has also served as Senior Editor for MISQ, Information Systems Research (ISR), and Journal of Strategic Information Systems and Associate Editor for ISR, MISQ, Management Science, Journal of Management Information Systems, and other leading journals; Panelist for the National Science Foundation; Track Co-Chair for major conferences; chair, mentor and keynote speaker for doctoral/junior faculty/mid-career faculty consortia; and President of the Special Interest Group on the Adoption and Diffusion of Information Technology. He has served on the Board of Directors of Apollo Indraprastha Medical Corporation and Apollo Health and Lifestyle Limited and on the Developing and Deploying at Scale Disruptive Technologies Working Group of the US National Commission on Innovation and Competitiveness Frontiers.