Spain has spent years talking about economic modernisation, but it continues to drag along a structural contradiction: it aspires to move closer to Europe in income, wages, and productivity while maintaining levels of investment in R&D below those of the continent’s most competitive economies.
The central idea is clear: the wealth of a territory does not depend solely on cyclical factors or sectors such as tourism, but on its ability to generate innovative industry, export, and transform knowledge into economic activity.
Productive innovation versus cyclical growth
Ferràs points out that there is no automatic relationship between greater investment in R&D and higher wealth. There are exceptions such as the Balearic Islands, where tourism sustains high income levels despite low technological investment. However, the general pattern remains the same: the strongest economies tend to rely on high value-added industrial sectors, technology transfer, and business innovation.
This raises a fundamental difference between growth and the development of productive capacity. Spain has managed for years to sustain a model based on tourism-intensive services, but that model reaches its limits when long-term productivity is analysed.
Two different territorial models
The comparison between autonomous communities occupies a central part of the analysis. According to Ferràs, the Basque Country, Navarre, and Madrid represent the country’s main competitiveness hubs, although with different models.
Madrid concentrates advanced services, corporate headquarters, and technology linked to its status as the capital of the State. However, the model that the professor considers most replicable is the Basque-Navarrese one: a combination of private industrial R&D, innovative medium-sized companies, advanced technical training, and a close connection between business and university.
The key is for innovation not to remain within the academic sphere, but to reach the productive fabric in the form of patents, industrial processes, exports, and skilled employment.
The problem is not a lack of excellence
Spain has “islands of excellence,” but lacks an ecosystem sufficiently widespread to pull the country as a whole forward. The challenge is no longer only to strengthen leading regions, but to ensure that more autonomous communities develop their own technological and industrial capacity.
Concerning this point, Ferràs insists on the need for public policies capable of multiplying private investment and building innovation ecosystems distributed across the territory. More private R&D, more technology transfer, more medium-sized companies with technological capacity, and training more closely connected to the real economy emerge as central elements.
Industry returns to the centre of the debate
It also revives an idea that had lost prominence in part of the Spanish economic discourse: industry once again appears as a strategic element for sustaining productivity and competitiveness.
Communities such as Galicia, Asturias, Aragon, Castile and León, or the Valencian Community are identified as territories with an industrial base and sufficient technical knowledge to develop more innovation-intensive models, provided they manage to strengthen public-private cooperation and consolidate more robust technological ecosystems.
The conclusion running through the entire analysis is that competitiveness is not built solely through political discourse. It requires sustained investment, industrial organisation, and the capacity to turn knowledge into high value-added economic activity.
Compass’ Added value: innovation generates value when industry is capable of turning it into a real economy
For years, Europe assumed it could outsource part of its industrial capacity while retaining knowledge. The problem is that, without an industry capable of absorbing innovation, knowledge ends up escaping as well. Spain is beginning to reconnect with a classic but increasingly strategic idea: productivity does not depend only on consuming technology, but on producing it, integrating it, and scaling it. And that requires something more difficult than attracting occasional investment: building an innovative business fabric in a sustained way.
