Juan Santos is the SVP of Brand Experience and Innovation at the Tavistock Group and is leading innovation in Lake Nona, a neighborhood in Orlando, by creating an ecosystem where a diverse group of entrepreneurs and companies take their ideas and turn them into reality.
“One of the things we’ve found with innovation is that it's a rapidly depleting nutrient, so what we try to do from a Lake Nona perspective, is create an ideal ecosystem for ideas to take hold while inviting in additional innovators.”
Juan believes that Innovation is not something you can do continuously alone. As someone who’s always been at the intersection of technology, communication and art, he sees the ecosystem they’re building in Lake Nona to be a resource that continuously upgrades and re-nurtures an environment that is conducive to keeping innovation moving forward.
To keep innovation moving forward Juan believes in the idea of story doing. “To be innovative, you have to be a part of the story you’re doing.” In Lake Nona, Juan and his team find it a privilege to have the opportunity to not only talk about the things that they do, but create things that are remarkable, transformative and meaningful to others, all in an effort to have great stories to tell.
While Juan has visited Orlando numerous times as a tourist, he never thought he’d be actually living here. Now that he’s here, he sees the Orlando Life in a completely different light. He has found the environment to be incredibly collaborative and very diverse.
“It's a place where you actually have people of all different walks of life, of all different businesses, actually talking to each other significantly more than I had found in my professional experience in other cities. I've lived in quite a few places in the U. S., and even though I didn't expect myself to be living in Lake Nona, living in Orlando, I'm very happy that I did that and now I'm part of the Orlando-Lake Nona life.”