Rate My Professor Poonacha Medappa

Poonacha Medappa serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Systems and Operations Management within Tilburg University's Tilburg School of Economics and Management, a position he has held since August 2019. His academic journey includes a PhD in Information Systems and Operations Management from HEC Paris, completed between 2014 and 2019, where his dissertation earned a nomination for the HEC Paris Best Dissertation award. He also obtained a Post Graduate Diploma in Management from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, in 2008-2010. Before entering academia full-time, Medappa gained industry experience as a Senior Business Analyst and Consultant at Cognizant Technology Solutions in Bangalore from June 2010 to October 2013. Earlier roles encompassed a Design Engineer position at Larsen & Toubro Limited (Spectrum Infotech) in India from November 2006 to June 2008, and an internship at Alghanim Industries in Kuwait in April-May 2009.

Medappa's research centers on open-source software development, online communities, project management, and the application of machine learning techniques in empirical research. His work explores topics such as the impact of organizational ownership and write access in open source projects, AI-assisted coding tools like GitHub Copilot, and funding mechanisms in knowledge-sharing platforms. Notable publications include "Write access provisioning and organizational ownership in open source software projects: Exploring the impact on project novelty and survival" published in Research Policy (2025, with S.C. Srivastava and S. Dave Favaron); "Impact of categorization autonomy on effective use and adoption intentions" in Decision Support Systems (2025, with A. Saghafi and A. Debrliev); "GenAI as a coding partner: Productivity gains at the cost of sustainability and maintenance" (accepted 2025, with F. Xu, M. Tunç, M. Vroegindeweij, and J.C. Fransoo); and "AI-assisted programming may decrease the productivity of experienced developers by increasing maintenance burden" (2025). He received the Best Paper Award for Creativity in Research at the Strategic Management Society Annual Conference in 2021 (Competitive Strategy Interest Group) and has been nominated for awards including the Magid Igbaria Outstanding Conference Paper at ACM SIGMIS and the Strategic Management Society Research Methods Paper Prize. In 2025, he secured NWO Open Competition SSH XS funding as principal investigator for a project on challenges arising from AI tools in software development. Medappa teaches courses including Decision Support Systems, Web Data Integration in Practice, and supervises MSc theses in Information Management. He is open to supervising PhD students.