Catalysing the development of strategies and capabilities in Lazio-Rome: the constituency-building activities of City of Rome’s Eurolaboratorio

For the past two years the City of Rome has promoted a process of strategy making in the area of telematics.This process has been led by the Eurolaboratorio -a new policy- instrument created by the Municipality to promote telematics developments for Rome in a European context. Although the experience is recent, it represents a revealing attempt to stimulate a systematic and simultaneous development of both strategy and clustering of players in the arena of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The Municipality of Rome is a major economic as well as political player in the region. This makes its leading participation most interesting to examine, especially because the Rome-Lazio region and, indeed Italy in general, do not exhibit a long tradition of industrial or technology policy. In this respect, the process can be said to be inscribed in a ‘macro‘ national and regional context which conditions and interacts with the ‘micro’ strategy-making experience promoted by Eurolahoratorio. Ultimately, the issue is how the two dimensions combine and whether the Municipality‘s efforts have the potential to unfold and achieve a transforming impact on at least the regional context. The paper first provides an overview of the general economic and ICT industry background of Italy and Lazio. This provides the broad context for the second major empirical part that analyses the emergence and development of the Municipality's telematics strategy- making process. It includes a description of the rationale and operation of Eurolaboratorio, its success in taking the Municipality into many European collaborative research and technology projects; the approach implemented for the unified strategy-making/clustering process in Rome; the present stare of this process and the political-human influences influencing its development. With this in mind the paper is structured into three major sections. First, a brief overview of the general economic and ICT industry background of Italy and Lazio-Rome, including the state of research and development and the relationships of the University with industry. Second the constituency-building case of Eurolaboratorio and, third, a concluding discussion drawing together the main findings of the paper.