Emilia-Romagna is putting talent attraction into law, giving it a more durable institutional basis than any single programme or campaign can provide.
Most talent attraction runs as a programme. It has a budget, a team, a set of activities and a lifespan that lasts as long as funding and political attention hold. When priorities shift or money tightens, the programme is exposed, and the coordination it built can quietly come apart.
Emilia-Romagna has tried to give its talent work a more permanent footing. In 2023 the Italian region passed Regional Law No. 2/2023 on the attraction, retention and valorisation of highly specialised talent: the first regional law of its kind in Italy. Rather than launching another initiative, the region put talent attraction into law.
Eleonora Sette, who works on the Talent Attraction, Retention & Valorisation Programme at ART-ER, the Emilia-Romagna joint-stock consortium driving regional innovation, sustainable growth, and internationalisation, describes the law as a way of giving the region’s talent strategy a more coordinated and durable basis. “It establishes a coordinated framework of policies, programmes and services,” she says, one that covers highly specialised talent already living in the region as well as people considering a move or a return.
From initiative to institution
A statutory basis matters over time, for example when there is a change of government or a difficult budget year.
Talent attraction initiatives usually depend on continued goodwill: the right people staying in their jobs, the funding line surviving the next round, the partners choosing to keep cooperating. A statutory framework gives that work a different basis: the commitment to attract, retain and develop talent sits in legislation rather than in an arrangement that has to be re-justified each cycle. The question then shifts from whether the region will keep doing this work to how well it does it. That gives it a more stable basis for planning, and it is the part of Emilia-Romagna’s model that other regions cannot easily copy without making the same institutional commitment.
Within that framework sits it-ER, International Talents Emilia-Romagna, the regional programme supporting international students, PhD candidates, researchers, skilled professionals and their families with information, guidance and practical services. While it-ER is where much of the work gets delivered, the law provides the mandate behind it. The programme could clearly exist without the law, as many do elsewhere. What the law adds is permanence, and a reason for institutions across the region to treat working together as an obligation rather than a favour.
What the legal frame achieves that messaging cannot
Sette locates the real problem some way past branding. “The biggest gap is often between promoting a destination and providing the practical conditions that enable people to build their future there.” International talent needs reliable information about careers, research environments, entrepreneurship support, mobility procedures, housing and essential services, and families need to know whether they can integrate and build a life. Those are not communications problems. They sit across the responsibilities of universities, employers, municipalities and public services at once, and no campaign can bring those bodies into line with one another.
This is where the statutory framework matters. It gives separate institutions a shared, durable reason to align. Through it-ER, universities, research centres, companies, local authorities and a regional network of Talent Houses, local support services operating across ten of the region’s main municipalities, are brought together around the same mission: to present Emilia-Romagna “as a single, connected innovation ecosystem rather than as a series of individual institutions,” as Sette puts it.
Measuring success over the longer term
Legislating talent attraction also changes what success looks like, and lengthens the horizon over which it is judged. The relevant questions become ones that cross institutional boundaries and take years to answer: whether a researcher connects with the right people, whether an entrepreneur can navigate the available support, whether an international professional builds a career and stays. Those are harder to measure than campaign reach, and they are the outcomes the region has committed itself, in law, to pursue.
The wider lesson from Emilia-Romagna is that talent attraction becomes more consequential when a region treats it not only as something to communicate, but as something to govern. Of course, the law does not guarantee the outcomes. What it does is give the work a durable institutional basis, making it less dependent on any single campaign, funding cycle or change in priorities.
This article is part of Talent Attraction: Practitioner Perspectives, a series of six perspectives from people shaping talent strategy in cities and regions. For the wider picture, drawn from 43 places, see The State of Talent Attraction 2026: From Campaigns to Infrastructure.
The Emilia-Romagna is also featured in the Talent Attraction Leaders Europe & North America special edition.
