Professor Anthony De Ritis, brilliant head of the Northeastern University music department, composer, and a high tech entrepreneur, has been consulting with the Chinese to help them find ways to make them more entrepreneurial in the future. They believe the process of creating music lends itself to corporate innovation.

— John Cullinane, software products pioneer and author, Smarter Than Their Machines: Oral Histories of Pioneers in Interactive Computing (2014)

 

Anthony P. De Ritis, MBA, PhD, is Professor and former Chair of the Music Department at Northeastern University in Boston (2003-2015). He was formerly a Faculty Advisor to the School of Technological Entrepreneurship (2006-2009), and appointed within the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business (2011-2019).

In 1998, De Ritis accepted a position to help Northeastern establish programs in multimedia studies and music technology, and has since led the development of Northeastern’s graduate programs in digital media, game design, and music industry leadership.

From 2002-2011, De Ritis led the development of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) Online Conservatory, a series of online master classes about composers and compositions presented in support of BSO concerts. This website was a supplement to traditional text-based program notes and pre-concert talks, which included audio and video presentations, and interactive learning modules, that served as tutorials to the formal construction of compositions presented by the BSO. In October 2005, the Online Conservatory was described a best practice in “left-brained” integrated marketing by Forrester Research.

…one of the most compelling examples of communicating the brand and values of an institution anywhere on the Web. By using motion, sound, and highly sophisticated (but beautifully simple) interactive teaching tools, the BSO’s Online Conservatory does more to sell the value of a big-city symphony than any brochure, sell sheet, or TV spot ever could.

— Sean Carton, “Applications, Not Ads,” the ClickZ Network (2003)

In 2006, De Ritis was appointed to the Faculty Advisory Board of Northeastern’s School of Technological Entrepreneurship, where he led the University’s commitment to Global Entrepreneurship Week, singled out by the Kauffman Foundation for its effectiveness in creating activities to train aspiring entrepreneurs (2008). In 2011 he was awarded a participatory joint appointment within the D’Amore-McKim School of Business’ Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group where he has offered several courses including: Design Thinking for Market-Driven Innovation; Managing Creativity for Entrepreneurs; and Arts-Based Learning for Managers.

In Fall 2011, De Ritis was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and is still featured by the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES) for the role that innovation played in his Fulbright experience and beyond. De Ritis has offered several workshops on design thinking at the Communication University of China and Tsinghua University’s xLab (in its School of Economics and Management); is a Master of Music and New Media Arts Management of the DeTao Group; and in 2016 was appointed a “Special Professor” of the China Conservatory of Music’s “Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Chinese National School of Music.”

In 2014 De Ritis was appointed to the international board of SAGE Publishing’s new journal of Global Media and China, and was guest editor (with Si Si) of the special issue: “Media and Entertainment Industry: The World and China” (Volume 1, Issue 4). In 2015 De Ritis received the “Best Research Paper” award for Inhibitors to Innovation in Chinese Students: The Case of the Ballet Slipper at the Annual 5th International Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Singapore, with colleagues John Friar and Zhang Wenjun.

De Ritis completed his Ph.D. in music composition at the University of California, Berkeley, with an emphasis in computer applications, and was a research affiliate at Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) where his responsibilities included teaching and applied research related to human computer interaction and interactive real-time performance. De Ritis also holds an MBA in High Tech from Northeastern University.