A model for the analysis of territorial competitiveness

This work will be dealing with the change in logics of competition over the last years, with the shift from company competition to territorial competition, as well as the shift from a bottom-up approach (technologic districts) on territory development to a top-down approach (technologic clusters). The work will especially focus on the role of policy makers, as well as on other public-private subjects. (large companies, universities or research centers) as meta-organizers of the territory, or catalysts for territorial development (catalytic changes) which, as such, are able to strategically orient a territorial area and to eventually settle on competitiveness . Through a close examination of writings about the relationship between local development and territorial competitiveness, hypotheses, on possible evolutions and tendencies of territorial competitiveness. will be identified. The importance of country specific factors is especially remarked to point out both the territorial competitiveness and the role of the meta-organizer on enhancing those factors and transforming them into competitive drivers. Moreover, a more suitable to territorial competitiveness organizational model will be identified , which is to say the technological clusters model, by pointing out how it can encourage technologic, cross-sectional, interdepartmental and interregional synergies, which are essential to a modern territorial competitiveness. An evolutionary model of territorial competitiveness based on the previously mentioned hypothesis will be elaborated and a case-history will be described: The Consorzio del Brunello di Montalcino, useful to exemplify the different stages of the theoretical model, as well as to compare the basic hypothesis of the model to a real case.