Barcelona’s entrepreneurial ecosystem needs to gather basic consensus among its protagonists to reaffirm its future as a European city of reference in technology. This was revealed yesterday by Miquel Martí, general director of the Tech Barcelona association, and Pau Solanilla, Barcelona City Council Commissioner for City Promotion, at the round table on startups that was held yesterday on the first day of the Cercle d ‘Economy.

“Barcelona has managed to appear in European innovation and entrepreneurship rankings in ten years. However, it needs to have a shared long-term vision between the public and private sectors to consolidate its future,” said Martí, who represents more than a thousand companies in the city’s digital sector.

Betting on the training of local talent and the attraction of foreign talent “is the main challenge of Barcelona”, since the excellence of professionals is the greatest asset to guarantee global startups. Martí added that it is also key to ensure that the science that emerges from universities becomes a product or service for companies, called for better infrastructure and connectivity and asked that Barcelona become a scenario for pilot tests of new technologies.

In general terms, Solanilla also agreed, highlighting the need to strengthen the Barcelona brand as a digital hub of the Mediterranean and as a bridge connecting Latin America and Asia. “We have to raise our self-esteem and show the world all the assets we have,” he said. In addition, the commissioner highlighted the importance of the municipal role in urban planning. In this sense, he praised the 22@ project, converted twenty years after its birth into a district that welcomes the main startups and multinationals linked to the digital world. Despite opening the door to technological advances, Solanilla was skeptical of the Silicon Valley model. Barcelona works with an ecosystem that promotes sustainability and equity and not all technology companies comply with these principles, he said, referring to the restrictions that Uber has in the city.

Regarding public policies to support the entrepreneurial ecosystem, Einat Magal, director of the science office of the Israel Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology, also spoke, who highlighted the importance of government incentives for innovation. This is how “Tel Aviv has managed to position itself as a first-rate technology hub, with a startup ecosystem valued at 400,000 million dollars, only behind London on the European continent,” she said.

Natalia Olson, President Obama’s former Innovation and Competitiveness Advisor and current director of Plug and Play, also participated in the round table, who recommended, along the same lines, the approach of governments to large corporations. In this sense, she gave as an example the sharing of data between large technology companies and administrations to achieve technological advances in telephony.

Yesterday, the Cercle d’Economia also awarded the José Manuel Lara Award for Ambition and Business Purpose to Jordi Barri, CEO of the Flax restaurant group