A National Ecosystem with Regional Borders
Spain’s entrepreneurial ecosystem is national in its policy ambition but regional in its daily operation. A founder’s access to finance, mentors, customers, research partners and public support depends partly on where the company is based and which institutions it can reach. This discussion examines that geography together with two related questions: whether participation is distributed fairly across founders, and whether internationalisation can compensate for domestic limits. The aim is to judge when local specialisation creates strength and when fragmentation prevents a funded company from scaling.
One country, several access regimes
Spain’s decentralised structure has a genuine advantage. Regional governments can tailor support to local industries, labour markets and research capabilities. A region with a strong energy sector may be better placed to support clean-tech ventures than a general national programme. Local actors may also identify regulatory or infrastructure problems more quickly than a central ministry can.
The same structure creates coordination costs. Spain’s 17 autonomous communities and two autonomous cities have significant authority over regulation, support programmes and parts of the university system. A startup that expands across regions can encounter different permits, licences, standards, environmental rules, investor incentives or administrative procedures. A policy that is locally sensible can become nationally inefficient when a company has to repeat the same work each time it crosses an internal border.
The concentration of ecosystem activity makes the access problem visible. Madrid and Barcelona account for 51% of Spanish startups in the cited Crunchbase dataset. Their concentration is not necessarily a defect: large hubs can offer deeper investor pools, denser talent markets, specialised advisers and more frequent customer or corporate connections. But concentration can become self-reinforcing. Investors follow deal flow, mentors follow investors, skilled workers follow opportunities and support organisations form where the other actors already are. A founder outside the main hubs may therefore face a thinner network before anyone has assessed the quality of the company.
This creates two different policy risks. The first is to spread resources so evenly that no region develops enough specialisation or critical mass. The second is to invest only in the leading hubs and assume that their success will diffuse automatically. The OECD’s diagnosis favours connection rather than either extreme: preserve strong regional ecosystems while building reliable links between Madrid and Barcelona and more peripheral areas.
A national capital pool does not remove the geography of access. Funding opportunities are discovered through networks, introductions and reputational signals. A founder who cannot reach the investor, researcher or first customer relevant to the next stage may not be visible to the pool in the first place. The same applies to public support. Spain has many national and regional programmes, but companies can find it difficult to determine which instrument fits their stage or how one programme connects to another.
The National Entrepreneurship Office, or ONE, is intended to make this landscape easier to navigate by gathering information about support, laws and procedures. The National Startup Forum creates a place where ministries, regions and other stakeholders can discuss policy. The proposed Régimen 20 framework aims to reduce regulatory differences through a targeted menu of harmonisation measures. These mechanisms address different parts of the problem: one improves information, another coordination and another the rules themselves.