Will Barcelona be the "Palo Alto of The Mediterranean"?

I popped over to ifest 2008 the other day and sat in on a few interesting talks regarding business and innovation and the entrepreneurial scene in Europe. Both Herve Lebret and Nick Leon touched on the theme of innovation within societies and contrasted the U.S. (primarily Silicon Valley and Boston) with Europe, and tried to draw some conclusions why Europe always seems to be one step behind. Herve’s presentation went into this theme in great detail and he has also published a book on this subject (Herve, when do I get a copy?).
Nick’s talk also touched on this as he asserted that a city needs an ecosystem of innovation to align the talents and resources they have in order to build a successful innovation juggernaut (like SF and Beantown). To this end, he made a point that Barcelona could very well be positioned to be the next great city of [...]