Last Tuesday, I was in Brussels. I attended the CoR-OECD conference and annual meeting of EER regions. The European Committee of the Regions hosted the conference and there I talked about the Catalan technology and startup ecosystem. Let me summarize now the content of my communication.
I wanted to remark that something interesting is happening in startups & technology hubs around the globe and I wanted to use the specific case of Barcelona & Catalonia for illustrating that. I mentioned that we have a potent ecosystem in Barcelona, which manifests itself in figures and facts like the following:
- We have more than 2,000 startups
- Which in 2018 raised € 1,000 of investment
- We have more than 30 private accelerators that support the growth of these startups
- The city of Barcelona has more than 200 coworkings spaces. It is the second city in Europe after London in number of coworkings spaces
- Biocat – the entity that guides our biomedical and biotechnological sector – poses as a strategic objective that in 2025 there are 100 international investors acting in Catalonia. It is not a disproportionate goal: Today there are 41 when in 2014 they were only 6
- Traditional corporations see startups as a source of innovation and create acceleration and corporate venturing programs
- We have emerging sectors such as blockchain or quantum, which are fed by research (for example, ICFO) and are generating spinoffs and startups.
- Highly specialized investment funds arise. For example, QVentures only invests in quantum projects
- The technology in our ecosystem is clustered in a number of local hubs, in the center of which there are technological buildings, science parks and big world coworking monsters such as Wework or Spaces.
- Digital nomads: There are rankings like Nomad List, which typify almost 1000 cities in the world. Barcelona occupies one of the first positions in this dynamic list.
The consequence of all this is the arrival of large global technology companies in Barcelona. In 2018, companies like the following announced the introduction of a digital center or R&D or technology in Barcelona: Nestle, Lidl, Allianz, Mediamarkt, N26, Facebook, Moodle, Microsoft, Siemens, Asics, IGG, Roche, Cisco, and many more.
Also companies like Frank Recruitment Group, who finally -together with totally new actors like JobFluent- will manage the arrival of talent to the ecosystem and to those technological and digital centers But … Why Barcelona and Catalonia have so much activity in these fields? Thanks to what this phenomenon is happening? This comes from the following facts:
- A long commitment to R & D and education
- A set of public support policies that promoted tech transfer and entrepreneurship
- Events like MWC, Smart City Congress, etc.
This is happening around the world, in some few hundreds of ecosystems. And it happens because we are in a new economic model, a model that can be synthesized as the Economy of the Startups. This economy comes from Silicon Valley and has spread throughout the world. It is characterized by issues such as the following:
- A great value and participation of the individual creators, which drag other actors in the achievement of technological improvement objectives and search for disruption
- The expectations placed on technology
- The accompaniment of risk capital
- The existence of winners and also –and mainly- many losers
- A specific value chain, different from that of traditional companies, with accelerators
- The generation of companies from other companies. The semiconductor sector in Silicon Valley was formed thanks to Fairchild, and corporation that generated dozens and dozens of other new companies, Intel among them
- The clustering of technology in the territory, mainly in cities
- The role of universities and research centers, which are always at the origin of these great technological movements
The empowerment of the individual creator has extended to other areas of economic and social activity, not only in the entrepreneurial field. Concepts such as the following also have their basis in the new perception of the ability of the individual entrepreneur to change things:
- The global circulation of talent, a permanent circulation that decides to land in those attractive ecosystems and cities
- Part of this talent, digital nomads, has defined a new way of life, at least at certain times in their lives
- It is a talent with a desire to solve the great challenges of society
- The concepts Crowd (crowdsourcing, crowdsolving, crowdfunding, etc.) originate precisely from the desire to use intelligence and collective resources to solve challenges
- Social entrepreneurship sees new channels (the so-called entrepreneurship of impact) to solve major challenges
- Entrepreneurs and ecosystems are highly motivated because of the resolution of challenges, whether for social or economic purposes, of the market. Events like hackathons, ideathon, cybathlon, codeathon, startups challenges …
- The challenges come to the educational system, to schools and to universities
- Entrepreneurship makes the world more flat. Startups originate everywhere and provide opportunities to environments considered complicated. Many young Africans now have opportunities to enter into this global entrepreneurial dynamic
- Young people in the ecosystem want to do and build. Makers are another interesting actor
- Also fablabs, coders and coworkings are expressions of the new context
- As well as the collaborative economy
- Presentation and networking events, totally informal, have nothing to do with traditional corporate events and conferences. They are conceived as parties. But they work
- New management techniques that come out of startups and extend to traditional companies, like Lean Startup.
Of course Richard Florida is aware of the rise of the Startup Economics. This famed academic was the one who advanced the phenomenon, seeing first of all the pillars on which it was based: Talent, Technology and Tolerance. Where were those 3 Ts concentrated? In big cities. Richard Florida today analyzes the extension of the phenomenon from the origin in Silicon Valley to the rest of the world. Together with Ian Hathaway he has just published an interesting research: “Rise of the Global Startup City“. The study shows that investment in risk capital is no longer a phenomenon of the United States (and, more specifically, of certain areas such as Silicon Valley, New York and Boston) to spread throughout the world. The authors remind us that the United States is the birthplace of modern technological startups and the financing model that sustains them: venture capital. This financing model appeared in Boston in the 1940s and then moved to Silicon Valley, to support the different waves of technology companies that have originated there. The authors analyzed more than 100,000 investment agreements between 2005 and 2017 and located them in 300 metropolitan areas in 60 countries. What does the study show? That the phenomenon is spreading to the whole world. Today American companies “only” account for half of the investments that occur in the world.
KPMG recently has published a paper suggesting the 20 cities outside Silicon Valley that will be leading Tech Hubs over the next 4 years. Barcelona is there, in the nineteen position.
All these cities compete today for the most valuable resource: TALENT. This entails the need for new policies to support entrepreneurship. In our ecosystem we believe we have to work things like these ones:
- Making our society more aware of the new times
- Adapt our University: Approaching students to research activities. Students must be impregnated of Science and Technologyo Supporting initiatives for Deep Tech. Also introducing the Challenges as a tool of education
- Adapting also our secondary schools
- Approaching the local administrations (city halls and so on) to the new phenomenon
- Forming our teachers
- Configuring a capacity of our ecosystem to react QUICKLY to the emerging opportunities
- And so on.
Be aware that MONEY is not an essential element today. Money for technology and entrepreneurship is today a commodity. BUT…the most important element is TALENT. Talent is the most relevant factor of tech and entrepreneurship policies