The study, promoted by Impact Hub Madrid and Impact Hub Donostia with technical support from Mercatec Investigación Estratégica and funding from the ALIANZAS ES Programme of the Ministry of Labour and Social Economy, analyses Spain’s 50 provinces through more than 120 indicators organised in three dimensions: ecological health, social health and economic-entrepreneurial health. It was presented on 17 June in Madrid.
A map that redefines what it means to be competitive
The report proposes an alternative reading to traditional territorial analyses, focused almost exclusively on production and employment indicators. The underlying argument is clear: a territory’s strength to face the climate crisis, demographic transformation or the increase in inequalities is not measured solely in GDP figures.
The best-positioned provinces are those capable of weaving solid relationships between administrations, companies, universities, social entities and citizens. That capacity for articulation, according to the authors, is as decisive as conventional economic indicators.
The ranking: medium-sized provinces among the most resilient
The ten provinces with the best overall results are Madrid, Navarre, Girona, Huesca, La Rioja, Gipuzkoa, Bizkaia, Teruel, Lleida and Araba. The most striking fact is that several medium-sized provinces outperform territories with more intense economic activity.
Navarre leads both the ecological and economic dimensions. La Rioja, for its part, achieves a prominent position in the social sphere despite being in lower positions in economic terms. The pattern that emerges from the analysis suggests that the diversity of the social fabric and the capacity for collaboration are as relevant as the volume of business activity.
At the opposite extreme, the provinces of southern Spain and the archipelagos present the greatest margin for improvement, especially in governance and environmental sustainability.
Ecosystems as living systems
The conceptual framework of the index understands entrepreneurial ecosystems as living systems in which economic, social and environmental factors are closely interrelated. Territorial resilience does not arise from the sum of individual resources, but from the quality of the interdependencies between them.
From this perspective, the tool is aimed at public administrations, companies, universities, research centres and social organisations working on processes of ecological transition, territorial innovation and sustainable development. The stated objective is not to establish a competition between provinces, but to offer a snapshot that allows strengths, imbalances and opportunities for improvement to be identified.
A relevant limitation: the data lags behind
The authors themselves acknowledge a structural restriction of the index. Many territorial transformations are not yet reflected in the available data: emerging collaboration networks, new forms of governance or cultural changes can take between four and five years to manifest in statistical indicators.
This makes the index something more than a snapshot of the present: a tool for interpreting processes of change that are already underway and that will be decisive for the adaptation capacity of territories in the next decade.
Compass Insight: An ecosystem is not managed, it is cultivated
For decades, territorial policy has operated with an engineering logic: identify gaps, allocate resources, measure results. The Impact Hub index proposes —although it does not say so in these words— that this logic has a limit A living system does not respond to management, it responds to care. What differentiates Navarre from a province with more GDP and less cohesion is not a one-off investment decision, but years of relationships built between actors who learned to collaborate before there was an indicator to measure it. The consequence is uncomfortable for those who design public policies: the most powerful levers to transform a territory are precisely those that do not appear in any budget. Infrastructure of trust, culture of collaboration, diversity of the social fabric. Things that are not put out to tender, are not executed within a mandate and are not measured until four years after they have happened.
