About
Island Innovation Lab
Island Innovation Lab is a platform for thinking seriously about tourism — not as a marketing exercise, but as a system that shapes territory, communities, and everyday life.
It was built from the belief that the most important questions about tourism are rarely asked at the destination level. They live in neighborhoods, in service moments, in the gap between policy and practice — and in the spaces that get redefined before anyone notices.
The platform combines field research across five countries, three original frameworks, real case studies, and a critical geography perspective that keeps the analysis honest. The goal is not to celebrate tourism or condemn it — but to understand it well enough to redesign it.
What we do
Write, research, and advise — on tourism systems, micro-destination development, governance, and the territorial politics of growth.
Who we work with
Governments, DMOs, hotel leadership, local development actors, and anyone willing to ask harder questions about what tourism is actually producing.
Where we operate
Based in Aruba and Barcelona. Field research spanning Aruba, Bali, Fiji, and Spain. Working internationally.
The Authors
Randall Lacle
Founder · Tourism Strategist
Aruba
M.A. Destination Tourism Management
2× B.Sc. Hospitality & Tourism
Randall built the Island Innovation Lab from a simple premise: the most important questions about tourism are rarely asked at the destination level. Over a decade of field research across Aruba, Bali, Fiji, and Barcelona, he developed three original frameworks that now form the intellectual core of the platform.
His master's thesis at NHTV Breda University studied micro-destination entrepreneurship on Barcelona's Avinguda de Gaudí — a street connecting two UNESCO landmarks that tourism completely bypassed. The question of why potential goes unrealized in high-traffic destinations became a thread that runs through everything he has written since.
Earlier group research in Fiji documented how micro and small enterprises operate in permanent survival mode — cut off from the strategic direction of tourism by the very systems designed to support them. In Sanur, Bali, the same pattern appeared in a more mature destination approaching its carrying capacity.
His writing bridges academic rigor and practical clarity. Each piece is grounded in peer-reviewed research but written for the people who actually run destinations, make policy, or build tourism enterprises.
Alba Millán
Critical Geographer · Urban Researcher
Barcelona
Critical Social Geography
Urban Research: Barcelona
Alba brings a critical social geography perspective to the Island Innovation Lab — asking not just how tourism operates, but what it produces across territory, society, and everyday life.
Her work draws on Henri Lefebvre's production of space, David Harvey's analysis of capital accumulation, and degrowth scholarship to interrogate the spatial politics of tourism in constrained environments. Where most destination strategies ask “how do we grow responsibly?”, her research asks the prior question: responsible to whom, and at what cost to the territory?
Her cases from Barcelona — Trinitat Vella, Poblenou, and the Rec.0 district — offer a European micro-destination laboratory that directly informs how San Nicolas and other Aruban neighborhoods might be reimagined through community-led placemaking.
Her Territory & Power framework, developed through this platform, provides the analytical lens that sits behind every case study where space is being redefined without community consent.
Why this pairing
Different entry points
Randall enters from practice — service design, destination management, enterprise support. Alba enters from theory — spatial politics, territorial analysis, degrowth. Neither romanticizes growth nor dismisses it.
Shared intellectual honesty
Both are willing to name uncomfortable truths. Tourism isn't neutral. Sustainability can be co-opted. Small businesses are often left out of the systems designed to serve them.
Cross-geography learning
Aruba and Barcelona are very different contexts. The tensions between them make the questions more precise and the frameworks more transferable to other destinations.
Get in Touch
Start a conversation.
We don't do pitches or proposals. We start with a conversation about what you're working on — and whether the kind of thinking we do is actually useful for it.
Based in Aruba and Barcelona. Working internationally.