Rachel Wilson

Biography

Dr. Rachel Wilson serves The Jack C. Massey Graduate School of Business by teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in entrepreneurship and management. She received her Ph.D. in 2002 from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in Administration - Health Services and Strategic Management. She received her B.S. in Health Care Management in 1997 from the University of Alabama. After teaching at the University of Nebraska at Omaha as the Director of the startup Maverick Entrepreneurship Institute and then at Middle Tennessee State University, she joined the faculty at The Massey School in 2015.

Dr. Wilson  has planned and supervised graduate and undergraduate study abroad programs in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Argentina, South Africa, Columbia, Chile, and Bangladesh. She teaches courses in entrepreneurship, small business consulting, healthcare, and strategic management, and incorporates her consulting experience and prior ownership of both Around the Way Dog, a restaurant, and Wilstar Construction, Inc. into her classes.

In 2022, she partnered with Harvard Business Publishing to create a web-based strategy simulation themed on Michael Porter’s Five Forces analysis of a firm’s external industry environment. This educational game challenges student players to adopt a role as competitors, customers, suppliers, and potential startups and to make decisions based on shifts and news headlines impacting their industry. Players can experience both the gourmet chocolate and e-scooter industries, operating in the United States and the EU, respectively. After competing players have submitted their decisions, other teams’ decisions are revealed, and new challenges await as the game progresses. The goal of the simulation is to help students conceptualize the many contrasting motivations of firms in the same ecosystem.