Spain is a leader among OECD countries in recognising the importance of innovative startups and scaleups to economic competitiveness and growth and introducing policy reforms to encourage them. Spain’s comprehensive Startup Law of 2022 was a major milestone, introducing a package of measures for building a high-performing entrepreneurial ecosystem, including actions in the areas of business regulation, entrepreneurial finance, attracting and developing talent, and promoting university-business knowledge exchange. The government is complementing these measures with reforms in other areas and engaging in monitoring, analysis and consultation to steer the implementation and further development of these policies.
To contribute to the effort, this report presents an OECD diagnostic assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Spain’s entrepreneurial ecosystem today and makes recommendations on potential policy actions that could further increase innovative startups and scaleups in Spain. It is one of the outputs of a project on promoting innovative entrepreneurship in Spain delivered by the OECD at the request of Spain’s Ministry for Digital Transformation and Civil Service and financed by the European Commission through the SG REFORM Technical Support Instrument.
The assessment is based on the OECD’s Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Diagnostics framework, which benchmarks countries on their entrepreneurship performance and enabling conditions in the areas of institutions, culture, networks, infrastructure, markets, finance, knowledge, talent, leadership, and intermediate services. It includes new benchmarking indicators and country comparisons for Spain and develops further insights from interviews with ecosystem stakeholders and questionnaires completed by Spanish government authorities. The report offers a number of policy recommendations for Spain complemented by international inspiring practice policy examples.
This report contributes to the Programme of Work and Budget of the OECD Committee on SMEs and Entrepreneurship (CSMEE). It was submitted to the OECD Committee on SMEs and Entrepreneurship (CSMEE) [CFE/SME(2025)18] for discussion at the 9th Committee on SMEs and Entrepreneurship on 5-6 November 2025 and written comments by 28 November 2025.