What are basic, crucial requirements for a successful innovation ecosystem?

The Silicon Valley ecosystem centers around Stanford University and Sand Hill Road (where all the VCs are). Many different parts of the world are now trying to build innovation eco-systems. It is not reasonable to expect that they would all start to build world class universities, or huge amounts of capital would start flowing there without any preamble. If I were to design an ecosystem from scratch, I would focus first on entrepreneurship, and not on innovation. Creating an entrepreneurship eco-system, IMHO, is easier than an innovation ecosystem. You can work with a virtual incubator like http://1mby1m.com  - out of Silicon Valley - that can give you an eco-system in a box, and plug you into Silicon Valley. This could get you started, with, say, 50-100 entrepreneurs working on various ideas that may not be earth shattering innovations, but they will start the process of entrepreneurship development.

Although I agree with many of the comments here, I would add that it's extremely important to have experienced talent.  Any good innovation ecosystem needs to have serial entrepreneurs and serial investors.  Serial entrepreneur is defined as someone who is lead at least five companies, and taken most of them to a successful exit.  Serial investor is someone who is invested in at least 10 companies, and most of those have had a significant ROI for him or her. These people play a critical role in any innovation ecosystem, and if you lack a significant number of them you simply will not get anything off the ground.  You can have all the entrepreneurs that you want, all the consultants and service providers, fancy new buildings, and lots of money.  All that will be utterly wasted if you don't have experienced people who know how to find a great company and then grow it to an exit.  Silicon Valley is the premier innovation ecosystem in the world precisely because of this.  There are more people there who know how to grow a company than any place else in the world.  And really both these people are two sides of the same coin. Anyone who is an entrepreneur and has achieved a successful exit will become an investor in new companies. That's how they find a good company to then be the entrepreneur of and take it to another successful exit., which in turn gives them more money to become yet a better investor. If you have done the cycle several times you will have undoubtedly have several failures under your belt as well as successes. If you've done this a minimum of five times, that means luck had nothing to do with it and you have learned and enormous amount of information and know all the players in your sector.   you know how to identify company, and you also know that it's about growing great companies not picking them like it's a casino. Virtually every plan that I have ever seen for developing an innovation ecosystem around the world forgets this important element.  Any region can have an occasional hit of a successful exit, but unless that is leveraged with experience talent it will always remain just a one off success.

Collaborative Office Spaces like http://wework.com here in NYC generate an entrepreneurial spirit with their glass walls and variety of exciting startups.