Ecuador's President, Rafael Correa, wants to develop the next Silicon Valley in his country, starting off with the city of Yachay.

Also known as the "City of Knowledge," Yachay is part of what Correa deems as the "the most important project in the history of Ecuador," with plans to make it the starting point of Ecuador's long-awaited economic transformation.

However, Correa's attempt at establishing Yachay as the world's next technological epicenter may be "a tall order" considering how his people have to build it from scratch, according to the International Business Times.

University of Washington Historian, Margaret O'Mara, explained how extensive the efforts are in attaining such goal.

"A lot of efforts [to build high-tech cities] revolve around a real estate proposition sometimes: 'If we build it, they will come.' And that's kind of dangerous," O'Mara explained.

"For building a research park, the places in North America that are 40 kilometers (24 miles) out from an urban area are having a hard time. It's hard to persuade people that they want to live and work in these environments," she added.

According to Montreal's McGill University, Assistant Professor of Geography, Sarah Moser, Yachay is among the first part of the efforts to establish new technological hubs and even paved the way for to 150 more similar projects.

She also noted that while such efforts seem to be a way of establishing techno hubs similar to Silicon Valley, there is still so much work to do before any city reaches close to that caliber.

"You look at Silicon Valley, which has world-class universities nearby, so there's a lot of buzz and energy bringing people around with a lot of money, but you can't just create that out of nothing. I would say none of those cities are success stories at this point," she explained.

Despite all these, Danilo Moreno of Yachay EP is positive that accomplishing such tall task-while difficult and time-consuming-is definitely not impossible.

"We're looking at 30 to 35 years to have a whole city. Normally, you need more than 40 years to complete a city. But we've been working and talking with places in Korea, France, Germany, Silicon Valley, Russia and we are learning from them. We are not going to have the same mistakes that they've already had," he told the IB Times.

There are also some hopeful Ecuadorians, like Mariela Cadena, one of Yachay Tech's pioneer students, who believe that they are a nation that can produce "good things" and be known for that all over the world.