A possible negative effect for the PMI, connected to the phenomenon of the markets globalization, could be the necessity to compete with "global" subjects of great dimensions. As it has been authoritatively emphasized, in these conditions the publicity as well must be "global": this would involve too many costs for the budgets of the PMI; the total market would generally favour those companies with a trademark and an image already "universally known". Such considerations lead to the search of innovative solutions, more suitable to enable the companies to seize all the opportunities offered by the outstanding process of economy globalization. The solutions will take into consideration the particularity of the regional industrial economic system, which is, as everybody knows, mostly based on the model of the PMI (small company).

ICT and territorial marketing

The situation can therefore be summarized in the following points:

a) to boost the use of Internet and of the data transmissions networks for the search of commercial and business information is one of the instruments set by the Region.

d) The e-commerce, one of the probable " revolutionary " elements of the next years, finds it hard to take off because of cultural reasons (of the users) and insufficient consideration from the enterprises. The Italian companies mainly use the web sites for promotional reasons connected to traditional forms of commerce.

The project introduced in these pages aims at the implementation of a service which can be useful to the Marche companies, mainly those ones more directly exposed to the international markets and, therefore, mainly involved in the process of internationalization.

According to the directives coming from the studies of the Permanent Conference, and considering both the particular conformation of the Marche economic system and the necessity of a " global " promotion effort (which is probably out of reach of the PMI), the Councillorship to the Industry of the Marche Region, in collaboration with the Informative Service of the Regional Committee, has realized a Marche enterprises data base, with the purpose of offering a service of " digital display window" of the Marche companies available on the world-wide network, Internet.

Therefore, the regional Councillorship has quickly given an answer to a clear requirement of some economic subjects; thus carrying out an active role of promotional support on line towards the Marche enterprises more exposed to the international markets. As we have tried to emphasize, this requirement comes into being out of the need to give a greater visibility to the companies in the global economic context, which is more and more influenced by the new technologies. More in general, however, the aforesaid requirement is further emphasized by several additional advantages that can rise from a management centralized, in this case, at a regional level. This service can represent, from a step by step point of view, the first step towards the definition of a homogeneous strategy of territorial marketing.

Finally, beside the simple service of " digital display window" further services will be later on developed: partnership, possibility to do statistics on the available data, etc.

In its first phase, the service is going to involve both all the Marche companies which trade with foreign countries and those which answer to further specific requirements (in total: 3.174 companies).

The data base, which is of a dynamic kind (that is: it can be updated by the interested companies and also gives the possibility to insert new data on explicit demand), will be initially composed in prevalence of those companies that have declared interests and relationships that cross the national borders.

The companies that have a data processing code, and that, therefore, turn out to be operating with foreign countries on the basis of their declarations to the respective Chambers of Commerce, presently are 2,858 on the whole regional territory. Such number corresponds to the 1,9% of all the Marche companies and to the 12,2% of all the enterprises pertaining to the Industry/Handicrafts field, as results from the census taken by the Infocamere databases. Making the comparison at a provincial level, we can notice that the companies taken into consideration approximately correspond to the 17% of the Industry/Handicrafts field of Ascoli, to the 16% of the one of Ancona, and to the 6% and nearly to the 11% of those respectively of Macerata and Pesaro.

The main added value of this regional service, as it has already been said and is going to be underlined in the following lines, regards the greater visibility offered, both at a national and an international level, to the companies and to the information and services contained in their respective Internet sites.

Whoever would ask questions like: "who produces what? ", with reference to a specific territory, like the Marche, evidently " known " by the whole world as regards the production field, could find in this site a useful support.

This is unlikely to be particularly useful to the simple user who wish to buy a pair of shoes made in Italy, given that, as it has been said, the electronic commerce is not sufficiently developed in Italy, yet; in this case, there are two possible alternatives: the first one is the organization of the company through the development of its own site able to manage the complex problematic of the e-commerce; the second one, lies in making a common effort to find a wide consent among the different subjects (productive world, local trade associations, Agencies) in order to create a centralized system able to manage the electronic commerce of a certain number of companies (see the Promoter initiative), taking advantage of all the possible synergies that would be created.

If the alternative chosen is the first one, the utility of the new regional site will considerably increase: its promotional service is integrated by the new services offered by the companies through their own sites. If the alternative chosen is the second one, more rational, it will take a long time for a complete implementation: in the meantime, the activity of the regional service of digital display window, will have produced the relative benefits to the companies: solicitation towards a greater employment of the new technologies, appraisal of the possible benefits of a more extended notoriety obtained via data transmission, utilities coming from the different services offered inside the site.

Practically, it helps the company to search a partner or simple collaborations at an international level. Currently, the partnership service is distributed in Europe through two different formulas: 1) BRE (Bureau de Rapprochement des Enterprises); 2) BC-NET (Business Cooperation Network).

The BRE is one of the first instruments of cooperation created by the European Commission for the PMI that are looking for a partner in other countries. As specified in some promotional outlines of the service, its objective is to promote the NOT CONFIDENTIAL transnational cooperation. The information about the demands for cooperation is made public. The data about the demanding enterprises are not usually made public, as it happens for the demands for cooperation, but are however at everybody disposal at the Eurosportello. The BC-NET is based on the activity of a network of councilmen, created on the European Union own initiative, which assists the PMI in the search of partners at regional, national, community and international level.

Therefore, the implementation of a data base management program apt to grant the distribution of such a service, implies the search for suitable solutions that would take in due consideration the problem of the confidentiality. However, the element that would mainly distinguish the service offered by the Region, from the homonymous offered by the Eurosportelli, is the automatism and the absence of intermediate passages based on the activity of the chambers structures.

1. it gives the companies a greater visibility than a private provider managing the same type of service could do: in fact, the Region, thanks to a unitary management of this service, can grant a lower degree of fragmentation. Such a greater visibility is naturally linked to the possibility to connect the new the site to the Region’s official one, which has a high consultation rate.
2. at everybody disposal in the world, there is a series of information relative to a numerically considerable group of Marche companies, the greater part of them habitually trading with foreign countries. The planned database, in fact, includes all the Marche enterprises that have declared to the respective Chambers of Commerce to belong to the habitual export/import companies category.
3. Strong territorial specialization at a regional level as far as the origin of the companies, and therefore of the products or the relative services, is concerned.
4. Th reclassification of the companies according to standard criteria (Istat activity, S.I.C. codes), contrary to what had been realized by other analogous initiatives, facilitates the phases of search to the users.
5. the service is totally free for the companies.

The publication of the companies’ data will be executed in compliance of the rules of law referring to the treatment of personal data (law 675/96 on the "Privacy"). The case in consideration falls within those for which the consent expressed by the person directly concerned is not necessary (art. 12 c. 1), as it is a data that can be obtained from Public Registries; however, the notification will also have to resort to the comparison with the companies directly concerned (art. 13 c. 1), which will be able to demand and to obtain total or partial modifications or erasures of the issuing data.

A first modality of notification has been proposed during the presentation of the Internet site, on the day of the Conference about "Competitiveness and occupation", in Senigallia, 15/16 October 1999. A direct modality of notification will be realized, in concomitance with the publication of the data, by a normal letter addressed to the entrepreneurs. The letter will contain, besides the notification, the password and the login that the company will have to use in order to enter, in "modification" modality, its own data.