Innovation districts: an investigation of the replication of the 22@ Barcelona’s Model in Boston

In 2000, the city of Barcelona launched 22@ Barcelona, dubbed the innovation district. The city sees the project as a means to accelerate Barcelona’s transition toward the knowledge economy. Other cities around the world have since followed the example of Barcelona, building or planning to build their own innovation districts. Boston began to establish its innovation district in 2010. Cities’ ultimate goal for these initiatives is to become more innovative and thus more competitive. Innovative districts are different from technology parks in that they aim to respond to a new economic paradigm in which economic production flows back to cities. The 22@ Barcelona model involves theoretical designs regarding five layers of innovation: economics, urban planning, productive, innovative, and creative. The comparative approach between 22@ Barcelona and Boston’s Innovation District intends to highlight the similarities and differences between those two innovation districts as well as providing a framework to define innovation districts.

Toward a venture capital-backed entrepreneurship model in Brazil

It is well documented venture capital‟s positive impact on creation and development of highly successful innovative companies worldwide. Venture capital not only provides funding to startups and SMEs (small and medium enterprises) that usually have financing gap, especially in emerging markets, but also brings a whole package of valuable resources that reduces companies‟ mortality rates. Using quantitative data obtained from an empirical survey as background, this paper discusses the role of venture capital in the success of innovative startups and SMEs, and it examines if, and to what extent, venture capitalists are supporting the entrepreneurial activity in Brazil. I focused on the portfolio companies analyzes and confirmed the hypothesis that the venture capital industry has been supporting entrepreneurship in Brazil. Second, I identified an important evidence of a venture capital‟s positive impact on economic activity, especially the capital market. Third, it became clear that venture capital-back entrepreneurship is highly concentrated in the Southeast region. And fourth, I identified that private equity expansion is also playing a key role on that dynamics. As consequence, I conclude that the venture capital (and private equity) industry has been very important to build an enormously dynamic and strong local entrepreneurial economy. Its committed capital grew 50% per year between 2005 and 2008 to achieve US$27 billion, which invested US$ 11 billion, which employs 1,400 professionals (75% with post-graduate degrees) and maintains 482 portfolio companies, mostly SMEs. In addition, venture capital-backed companies represented one third of the IPOs that occurred in Brazil between 2004 and 2008 (approximately US$15 billion).