From a link on
bcnbits's blog, an interesting article by Paul Graham on
what it takes to recreate the environment that makes Silicon Valley successful.
Basically, his premise is that you need the right combination of rich people and nerds, and that one of the two alone isn't enough. Miami, for example, has lots of money but no nerds, while Pittsburgh has lots of nerds but no investors. There are other criteria too, such as having a world-class university nearby, an interesting city center (I assume here he's referring to San Francisco, not Santa Clara) and a young and dynamic population, but these mostly serve as draws for the rich and/or the nerds.
Reading this from the perspective of Barcelona, I think that most of the criteria exist here too: certainly there is money around, there's a thriving and creative youth culture, and city centers don't get much more interesting than the Barri Gòtic. What the local universities lack in stature (I don't think anyone will argue that UB or Pompeu Fabra are in the same league as Berkeley, Stanford, or MIT) they make up for in quantity.
If there's an advantage that Silicon Valley has and which Catalunya lacks, it could be a much wider cultural diversity; when almost everyone is an immigrant, they come predisposed to change and aren't overly tied to the traditional ways of doing things. Still, looking at the history of Catalunya over the past 25 years, it's hard to argue that change isn't an integral part of the cultural landscape.
Almost all of modern-day Silicon Valley originated with "the traitorous eight" that defected from Shockley Semiconductor to form Fairchild (and later, Intel and Kleiner Perkins). Anyone know seven traitorous nerds or rich people out there in Barcelona?
