Spain is said to be madricentric. A snowflake or a civil defense alarm in the capital is enough to make the whole country comment. However, there are things that are not the property of the company city Madrid. And they are important things like the ecosystem of companies in the deep technologies (or deep tech), where the undisputed leader is its eternal rival: Barcelona. Regardless of which classification you look at, Barcelona always appears to be the most relevant in the country in this sector.
With a share of 13.2% of its own start-ups is devoted to them, it is even ahead of other big business cities such as Paris (9.3%), Berlin (9%) and London (7.5%). Startup Heatmap Europe Report 2021. The thing has some merit because unlike start-ups software that usually dominates most business ecosystems, invests and does business deep tech It involves all kinds of challenges, such as greater financial needs and development time than what is needed to create digital products. But These challenges have not been able to stop the flourishing of this strategic industry in the Catalan city. which is actually about to celebrate the second year of its now iconic Barcelona Deep Tech Summit.
Considering the difficulties and risks that deep technologies bring with them, it is an obligatory question how it managed to become its national epicenter. “The deep tech They are deeply linked to technology transfer. Therefore, in order to create an ecosystem around them, you need their raw material, which is a range of scientific knowledge and technology in cutting-edge areas,” he states content curator from Barcelona Deep Tech Summit, Aleix Valls.
Explain that this nutrient medium It began to take shape in the 1980s, when the Catalan government began to invest in research and development through tools such as the current network of Research Centers in Catalonia (Centres de Recerca de Catalunya or CERCA). “They are structures with their own identity, management and financing models that drive the crystallization of knowledge around certain verticals, which then gave rise to the development deep techsuch as biotechnology,” describes Valls.
In his opinion, the great success of this approach is that “Catalonia has learned to be very efficient by taking money and turning it into knowledge transfer”. This is the reason Barcelona represents the only Spanish place among the European clusters deep techaccording to him European Deep Tech Report 2023, prepared by Atomic. Madrid doesn’t even appear. In comparison, countries much smaller than us, such as Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, have more than one point on the map.
Among the various clusters that make up Barcelona’s deep technology ecosystem, the text highlights the Institute of Photonic Sciences, which, as it cannot be otherwise, is part of the CERCA network. For Valls, the center is a paradigm of the successful Catalan public-private sector innovation model: “Although it is attached to the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, It has an independent entity, which allows it to focus more on the world of R&D and cooperation with companies develop projects and promote scientific excellence.”
One of the keys to its successful operation when it comes to promoting the ecosystem deep tech lies, according to Valls, in The careers of CERCA researchers are not linked to teaching, allowing them to focus 100% on their investigations. In addition, the expert also points out that these centers can be much more competitive in terms of salaries, which supports their ability to attract foreign talent and help those who have left the country to return.
LOCAL PRIDE, NATIONAL PROBLEM
Barcelona also ranks first in the country Global Start-up Ecosystem Index 2023 using Startup Blink. Madrid is the second Spanish city in the index, but its 49th place in the global ranking contrasts with Barcelona, which is ranked 40th. However, the report warns that it has lost three places since last year. Details Valls: “All national innovation ecosystems are losing steam because we don’t do our homework well. Spain needs more alignment between the public and private sectors. In France, for example, the government is committed to artificial intelligence.”
He believes that the public sector bears most of the responsibility and advocates the creation of a “legal regulatory framework to facilitate transfer”. and find out another endemic problem: our lack of dedicated investors. “In 2020, Spain ranked tenth in Europe in terms of total invested amounts deep tech for the period 2015-2020 with 700 million euros, which represents only 15% of the total national venture capital (VC) investments. This means: “Spain has fewer dedicated VC projects deep tech with less funding and lower amounts,” warns a report on Spanish deep-tech entrepreneurship promoted by MIT.
Finally, Valls also laments the historical difficulty of finding the type of hybrid profile that business requires deep tech, which spans the world of business and science. This is exactly the type of problem that the Barcelona Deep Tech Summit is trying to solve. In addition, his program includes coach managing director Renita Kalhorn, specializing in advising business founders deep tech. And so it is content curator warns that “Although the researcher-entrepreneur profile exists, it cannot be an essential part deep tech, there must be a suitable between researchers and entrepreneurs who already have the capacity to start a business.
It is another of the milestones of the congress, which will be attended by 50 of them start-ups the most prominent of the 10 deep technology industries with the most weight in the city. There they will meet 17 investment funds that will try to seduce them with their innovative proposals. These matches Taking this into account, the questions between ideas and money become increasingly pressing innovation illuminated deep tech they have more and more weight in the framework of the European strategy of sovereignty and that its advances are inherently always aimed at solving one of the world’s greatest problems.
“REVOLUTIONARY LES PORTES”
If there is an area within deep technologies with a leading role for us, i.e. without a doubt biotechnology. Its potential to transform sectors such as food, agriculture and healthcare made it one of the 10 trends in our Retina Observatory 2023 at the start of the year. deep tech more recent, such as quantum computing, Spain’s extensive history in biotechnology explains the fact that out of 320 start-ups of deep tech in Catalonia, according to the data, almost 38.8% are devoted to it. Analysis of the deep technology start-up ecosystem in Catalonia 2023.
In second place is ubiquitous artificial intelligence with 25% of the total. Although this sector is not as connected to hardware as other typical ones deep techsuch as supercomputers and photonics, and although there is hardly a day when we do not see examples of their misuse, Its transversal nature could contribute to solving problems of all kinds, as the artificial intelligence DeepMind has already done, which won the Princess of Asturias prize this year for its ability to predict protein folding. The same month, another model from the same company appeared in the magazine Science after demonstrating that its weather forecasts outperform those of the most prestigious organizations such as the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
These types of advances make artificial intelligence one of the deep tech areas with “the greatest potential to change the world as we know it,” along with biotechnology and quantum computing, for Valls. The field of quantum applications may represent only 0.9% of the Catalan structure deep techand supercomputers reaches only 3.4%, but Barcelona has an ace up its sleeve that almost no one can compete with: MareNostrum5. “It is the only machine in the country and probably in Europe that could be able to compete with huge computing resources great technique”, Esteve Almirall, a professor in the Department of Operations, Innovation and Data Science at Esada, recently told us.
It is true that Spain is quite madricentricbut as far as deep tech, we Spaniards should be opening our eyes to see where our maximum potential is concentrated. It is not a question of competition, but of channeling efforts in the right direction so that the commitment that Catalonia began in the 80s will eventually crystallize into an international power with the ability to improve the world through technology and innovation. The whole country should be talking about this now..
All information and registration to go to Barcelona Deep Tech Summit available here.