Published on Linkedin on October 12, 2025
I just spent three intense days at BioSpain 2025 (https://www.asebio.com/en/news-events/news/biospain-2025-closes-record-attendance-and-passes-baton-bilbao-2026-host-city), participating in a most intense (!) partnering marathon, and also had the privilege of participating in two roundtables. One, wearing the hat of VP of P-BIO (https://p-bio.org), was entitled “๐๐ณ๐ฐ๐ฎ ๐๐ฆ๐จ๐ช๐ฐ๐ฏ ๐ต๐ฐ ๐๐ญ๐ฐ๐ฃ๐ข๐ญ: ๐๐ถ๐ช๐ญ๐ฅ๐ช๐ฏ๐จ ๐๐ค๐ข๐ญ๐ข๐ฃ๐ญ๐ฆ ๐๐ช๐ฐ๐ต๐ฆ๐ค๐ฉ ๐ต๐ฉ๐ณ๐ฐ๐ถ๐จ๐ฉ ๐๐ค๐ช๐ฆ๐ฏ๐ต๐ช๐ง๐ช๐ค ๐๐ฏ๐ง๐ณ๐ข๐ด๐ต๐ณ๐ถ๐ค๐ต๐ถ๐ณ๐ฆ ๐ข๐ฏ๐ฅ ๐๐ฆ๐จ๐ช๐ฐ๐ฏ๐ข๐ญ ๐๐ฏ๐ฏ๐ฐ๐ท๐ข๐ต๐ช๐ฐ๐ฏ ๐๐ฐ๐ญ๐ช๐ค๐บ” (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7382022461153853440/). The lively discussion we had there got me thinking. We recurrently discuss the policy levers and infrastructure required for innovation, but I’m convinced that we are missing the point on how real ecosystems actually form.
Barcelona’s Moment
Barcelona is having its moment. AstraZeneca just committed โฌ1.3 billion and 2,000 jobs. Fraunhofer opened its first Spanish facility here. The city is buzzing with biotech energy. But here’s what struck me during the sessions: this didn’t happen through detailed planning. It happened through convergence.
The Two Parallel Streams
Through conversations with my Catalan friends, I learned that twenty-odd years ago, around 2000-2003, economist Andreu Mas-Colell, serving as Catalonia’s Minister for Universities and Research, launched what became known as the “big bang” of Catalan research: creating ICREA to attract international scientific talent, founding new research centers like CRG, ICFO, IRB, and ICIQ. This was deliberate, strategic investment in basic science excellence.
But this wasn’t the whole story. While Spain’s regions historically received relatively modest direct scientific funding, Barcelona’s teaching hospitals, including the world-famous Hospitals Clรญnic and Vall d’Hebron, had already been quietly building something different. They were developing translational research capacity, embedding researchers alongside clinicians, creating institutes like IDIBAPS and VHIR where bedside questions found laboratory answers and laboratory discoveries rapidly reached patients.
They weren’t doing this because some policy document told them to. They were doing it because they were hospitals dealing with patients, and patients need solutions, not just publications.
When Streams Converge
Barcelona’s success came from the convergence of these two parallel streams. The basic science investment from 2000-2003 and the clinical translational work that had emerged organically, independently, met and reinforced each other. World-class basic science + embedded clinical research + genuine translational culture = an ecosystem where companies like AstraZeneca choose to invest โฌ1.3 billion because the talent, clinical access, and research excellence actually align.
This is, I believe, what we systematically misunderstand in ecosystem building: you cannot plan emergence. You can only create conditions where different streams of activity might converge.
What are these conditions? Josh Lerner’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why Public Efforts to Boost Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Have Failedโand What to Do About It” offers some interesting analysis, even if slightly outdated, about what to do and what not to do.
Lernerโs central argument revolves around a fundamental paradox: while successful innovation hubs like Silicon Valley, Singapore, and Tel Aviv all bear the marks of government investment and support, the vast majority of public efforts to create similar ecosystems have failed spectacularly. For every successful government intervention that spurs entrepreneurial activity, there are dozens of failed efforts that waste billions in taxpayer dollars. Lerners take is that governments worldwide employ both โstage settingโ and direct strategies to promote entrepreneurial activity. Stage setting involves creating favourable conditions through policy frameworks, while direct strategies include hands-on funding and support mechanisms. The difficulty is in finding the balance between the necessity of playing a catalytic role with awareness of the limits of their ability to stimulate the entrepreneurial sector.
My point here is mostly about the importance of, in Lernerโs language, โstage settingโ, and in this regard, I think Barcelona is a clear example that no matter how much you want to engineer success, it will take time beyond short electoral cycles.
The Pattern Repeats
At P-BIO, advising startups and regional institutions, I see this pattern repeatedly. The most vibrant innovation doesn’t come from executing someone’s master plan. It comes when different groups, solving different problems, suddenly discover they need each other.
At Biomeet 2025 (https://p-bio.org/evento/biomeet-2025/), the Portuguese Biotech sector’s annual meeting, we had a whole discussion dedicated to this and heard about Planet B.io (https://www.planet-b.io): how the convergence between excellent research already present at TU Delft and DSM’s willingness to engage set the stage for a successful ecosystem. Not engineered ab initio. The anchor was already there, the seeds had been planted decades in advance.
If the presence of industry represents a clear advantage, the secret sauce always seems to be (not very scientific, I knowโฆ) the presence of excellent academic institutions and excellent research. Research generates the knowledge on which innovation is built, but where some institutions are able to take it out of the proverbial ivory tower, others remain locked inside it.
The Translation Challenge
I’ve spent nearly three decades in this space: building biological data infrastructure, co-directing a health incubator, founding Ophiomics, working across research and entrepreneurship. What I’ve learned, and what I somewhat explore in my book “Precision Diagnostics: A Founder’s Journey” (https://www.pereiraleal.com/precision-diagnostics-book/), is that translation, whether at the company level or ecosystem level, requires people who can live in two worlds simultaneously. Not “either/or” but “both/and.”
Barcelona had researchers who were also clinically engaged. Clinicians who understood research. Institutions that valued both publications and patient outcomes. When the investment arrived, it amplified something that was already emerging.
Building Ophiomics taught me this at company scale. We didn’t follow a template. We found convergences between genomics expertise, clinical hepatology relationships, and data science/bioinformatics capabilities. The path wasn’t linear. It emerged through conversations, clinical insights, technological pivots, and a fair bit of stumbling around trying to figure out what actually solved real problems versus what just sounded clever.
What This Means for Ecosystem Builders
So what can we actually do if we can’t engineer ecosystems? There is so much blurb on this out there that I donโt believe a long enumeration is useful, but let me highlight four directions:
Stop benchmarking; start diagnosing. Don’t ask “how do we become like Barcelona?” Ask “what streams already exist in our region that might productively converge?” Portugal has excellent marine biotechnology research. Strong clinical research in specific disease areas. Agricultural expertise. These streams exist independently. The question isn’t copying someone else’s success. It’s creating conditions where our streams might discover they need each other. Where have the seeds been already planted?
Invest in translators. The most important people in convergent ecosystems aren’t necessarily the star researchers or successful entrepreneurs. They’re the people who can live in multiple worlds simultaneously. Clinician-scientists. Researchers engaged with clinical problems. Entrepreneurs maintaining deep scientific connections. These are the connective tissue where convergence actually happens.
Accept longer timelines and different metrics. Convergence takes time. Barcelona’s convergence happened over two decades, not two budget cycles. Stop measuring “number of startups created” in year two. Start tracking collaborative projects between previously disconnected institutions, researchers who split time between basic and clinical settings, problems solved that required capabilities from multiple streams.
Embrace productive inefficiency. The most valuable interactions often look “inefficient” by conventional metrics. Random conversations. Seminars in tangentially related areas. Time spent learning about fields outside your specialty. Barcelona’s hospital-based research institutes created physical and temporal proximity between people who might not otherwise interact. That’s not efficient. It’s fertile.
The Patience Problem
Convergence operates on timescales that don’t fit political cycles or institutional incentives. The people who made decisions in 2000-2003 that created conditions for Barcelona’s current success don’t get to cut ribbons on AstraZeneca’s โฌ1.3 billion facility. The clinicians who built translational capacity at hospitals before anyone was talking about “precision medicine ecosystems” are probably retired or dead.
How do you maintain strategic commitment to creating conditions for convergence when the payoff comes long after you’ve moved on?
Some partial answers – opinions that I hope that can at least spur the discussion: Document the strategy of emergence explicitly. Celebrate small convergences as leading indicators. Build constituencies who benefit and want it to continue. And accept that you’re planting trees whose shade you’ll never sit in.
A Question for the Network
When you’ve seen successful innovation ecosystems develop, how much was planned versus how much emerged from unexpected convergences? And what does that tell us about how we should (or shouldn’t) try to “build” them?
I’m particularly curious to hear from colleagues in the GCC region, where ecosystems are being built from scratch at a mind-boggling pace. What convergences are you seeing emerge there? What streams are you strengthening? What’s working that you didn’t plan for? And I guess more importantly, what are the pilars you are building now that will sustain the long term success and endurance of the ecosystem?
Final Thoughts
BioSpain, and the Biomeet before it, reminded me that we need less hubris about our ability to design ecosystems with short-term directed interventions, and think more in terms of long term โstage settingโ of the pilars that will sustain a future ecosystem.
We don’t build ecosystems by trying to build ecosystems. We strengthen independent streams, create conditions for interaction, and see what emerges. Sometimes you get vibrant growth. Sometimes things die. Sometimes the most interesting developments come from unexpected combinations.
At P-BIO, we’re working to strengthen Portugal’s biotech sector. We’re not Barcelona. We don’t need to be. We have our own streams. The question isn’t “how do we copy Barcelona?” It’s “what convergences are possible for us that haven’t happened yet?”
Because twenty-odd years from now, someone might be writing about the ecosystem that emerged in your region. Not because you planned it perfectly, but because you created conditions where convergence became possible.
Are you patient enough to find out?