Supporting SMEs Through Policy With Scale-Up

​Innovation can be the lifeblood of a region. 

Innovative companies bring young, highly skilled workers with dynamic lifestyles and young families. They avail of the already-existing businesses and services in the area. This injection of workers to a community can boost local businesses and increase employment opportunities.

However, innovative companies also have very specific needs, and the regions in which they settle need to be able to address these concerns. The Lazio Region in Italy knows this and has already put in place a number of initiatives to make the area more friendly to start-ups.

Now, those start-ups are growing up, and it’s time to support them to scale-up at the national and international level.

The “SCALE-UP Supporting concentration and robustness of SMEs within the renewed EU industrial policy” project involves several regions across the EU. It’s funded by Interreg Europe and LazioInnova is a partner in this project. The goal is to improve the policy instruments – such as Regional Action Plans – that support SMEs’ capacity to grow, both at national and international level.

LazioInnova have selected META Group to define a new Regional Action Plan that will outline the path that the Lazio Region needs to take in order to attract and retain innovative companies, as part of the SCALE-UP project.

META Group analysed all the good practices that LazioInnova and the other partners have shared regarding their regional policies. META Group also provided LazioInnova with a SWOT analysis and a validation of these best practices. Next steps will be the preparation of the Regional Action Plan to pave the way to the adoption of the selected practices to boost scale-up.