ACT Appoints First Chief Innovation Officer

IOWA CITY, Iowa—ACT CEO Jon Whitmore today announced that Miguel Encarnação has joined the organization as ACT’s first Chief Innovation Officer (CIO). Encarnação (pronounced EN-car-nah-SOW), comes to ACT with a background that combines experience in both academic and corporate settings in Europe and the United States. He completed his formal education in Germany – with BS and MS degrees from the Darmstadt University of Technology and a PhD degree from the University of Tübingen – all focused on computer science and human-computer interaction. The new CIO has led consumer technology innovation in healthcare at Humana in Louisville, Kentucky, where he most recently managed a staff of creative developers, software engineers and computer scientists in technology-focused R&D, rapid prototyping, innovation management, and internal and external partnership development. Encarnação also taught at universities in Germany and the United States. He founded the IMEDIA Academy, an accredited nonprofit vocational school of higher education supported by a consortium of eight international universities, focused on trans-disciplinary learning in interactive digital media design, development and commercialization. “Miguel brings a strong history of creativity and innovation to ACT that will spark new thinking and a creative approach to improving education and workplace success, as well as improving ACT’s corporate culture in the years to come,” said Whitmore. Encarnação’s main assignment is to spearhead the creation of an optimal environment and atmosphere that will enable ACT to become a more innovative organization. “Next to healthcare, education is one of the nation’s biggest challenges, today and in the future. So, it is exciting to be able to transfer the innovation experiences from one to the other while returning to education and workforce development, which are fields that I am passionate about,” said Encarnação. Encarnação is in the process of creating an in-house ACT Innovation Studio to tap the innovative spirit of people throughout the organization and to move ideas from inception to value-added applications. “He will help build a culture of innovation from the bottom up, thus opening up the doors of opportunity for creating new products, tools and processes at ACT,” said Whitmore.