Gov. Gina Raimondo named Richard Culatta, a former senior advisor to former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, as Rhode Island's first chief innovation officer.
"The role of the chief innovation officer will be about opening up government and using data to solve problems," Raimondo said in a Jan. 11 statement.
Culatta, a Rhode Island native, also was the executive director of the Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology.
"Government needs to become competent in the digital age and work with the private sector to tackle challenges that are too big for either to solve on their own," Culatta said. "In so doing, Rhode Island has the opportunity to become a nationally-recognized innovation hub."
At the Department of Education, Culatta led Datapalooza, an initiative to make government data more publicly accessible in computer-readable form and spur the use of that data by entrepreneurs as fuel for the creation of products, services and jobs.
The Office of Innovation sits at Rhode Island College in Providence and is supported by the Rhode Island College Foundation.
