New 2021-23 three-year industrial plan and 2021 annual plan of the Regional Economic Development Agency

The new 2021-2023 industrial plan and the 2021 annual plan of Sviluppumbria SpA, the Agency for Regional Economic Development, were presented during a press conference held online on 27 March. The meeting with journalists was attended by the President of the Umbria Region, Donatella Tesei, the Regional Councillor for Economic Development, Michele Fioroni, and the President of Sviluppumbria, Michela Sciurpa.

In line with the process of rationalization and revitalization strongly desired by the Regional Council led by President Tesei, which has affected all of the Region’s subsidiary agencies, the new governance of Sviluppumbria has launched in recent months an important program of management reorganization in order to clearly redefine its mission, identify strategic directions, objectives and activities while optimizing resources in order to contain the operating costs of the structure and increase productivity and quality of services provided. The results of this work have been incorporated into the Agency’s new 2021-23 three-year plan and 2021 annual plan, which were publicly presented immediately after their approval by the Shareholders’ Meeting.

“Sviluppumbria, like all the other regional subsidiaries, has been at the centre of a restructuring and review of its mission,” said President Tesei, “including through a spending review policy aimed at optimising costs while increasing the quality of the services offered. A concrete and transparent policy that Sviluppumbria is pursuing also thanks to the work of its President, Michela Sciurpa, and of the staff, whose professionalism should be increasingly valorised in the best possible teamwork”. The president also underlined the importance of today’s meeting of Sviluppumbria during which the two plans (the three-year strategic plan and the annual plan) were approved, two very important tools that contain the operational and concrete choices to ensure that the agency can play a leading role “in favouring economic recovery in a very delicate phase that has seen great suffering for everyone,” concluded Tesei, “starting with businesses and workers.”

The Regional Councillor for Economic Development, Michele Fioroni, declared himself “enthusiastic about the renewal project that the Regional Agency is carrying out. The new role that Sviluppumbria wants to play in the development of the regional economy is fundamental,” he added. “The Agency will increasingly become a proactive agent of change, a facilitator in the complex processes that our businesses will have to face in the coming years. With this in mind, activities will be intensified which, in close collaboration with the regional structure, will be devoted to frontier issues such as digitalisation, technology transfer, start-ups and internationalisation. And the plans that we are illustrating today fully capture the spirit of reform that the Council had hypothesized for Sviluppumbria, whose key word was and remains ‘openness’: openness towards the territory, the business system, and also towards other agencies, and institutions of education and academia such as the University.”

“The Region of Umbria has asked us to return to play a central role in the process initiated for the socioeconomic revitalization of Umbria,” said Michela Sciurpa, Sviluppumbria’s President. “In order to implement our new role, we have redefined the Agency’s mission,” she added, “putting businesses and the region at the centre of our operations, supporting their trajectories of innovation, internationalisation, investment attraction, tourism promotion and the development of regional real estate assets. Among the new objectives is the strengthening of the Agency’s capacity to tap into funding and develop European projects, and the relaunching of its communication activities in order to make as many users as possible aware of the services and measures that the Agency makes available on behalf of the Region. The new operation requires a proactive role and a capacity for constant dialogue with all public and private regional players and with potential investors and innovators, a dialogue that we will pursue in a new synergistic and highly collaborative approach with the entire regional structure of which Sviluppumbria is an operational tool,” Sciurpa continued. “The new key words are listening to the needs of the region, networking and co-designing measures and interventions with stakeholders to find suitable solutions to overcome regional criticalities.

“The project to redefine our mission entails a new management model for the Agency: from the former rigid, hierarchical, vertical and bureaucratic structure, we are moving to a new streamlined, flexible and efficient organisational model, capable of simplifying procedures and reducing intervention times. We are aiming for an increasingly European, digital and sustainable Sviluppumbria,” concluded Sciurpa, “by saving public resources, increasing services for businesses and citizens, and investing the resources entrusted to us by the Region in projects with a measurable impact on regional economic development.”

(Press release issued by Agenzia Umbria Notizie)