Our Resources
Our presentations, reports, and tools are designed to give you clear, practical guidance for building incentive programs that create lasting community benefits.
PRESENTATIONS
INCENTIVES THAT WORK – JULY 2025
A Guide for designing and managing effective economic development incentive programs.
CORE CONCEPTS:
-
Incentives That Work presents a framework for designing effective economic development incentives that connect to broader community goals rather than functioning as isolated deal-making transactions.
-
Effective incentive programs share eight key characteristics: targeted focus, discretionary flexibility, significant private capital leverage, limited duration, transparency, accountability requirements, program caps, and strategic alignment.
-
Success requires treating incentives as strategic investments with rigorous fiscal analysis, performance based agreements with milestones, comprehensive monitoring, and transparent public reporting of costs and outcomes.
INCENTIVES 101 – JANUARY 2025
Introduction to business incentive concepts and best practices.
CORE CONCEPTS:
-
Strategic alignment: Incentives should accomplish economic development goals, not just win deals.
-
Diverse toolkit: Governments use many incentive types beyond tax breaks.
-
Decision process: Economic developers can implement procedures to make sound incentive decisions.
-
Accountability mechanisms: These procedures enable answering questions about incentive effectiveness.
INCENTIVES BEST PRACTICES – DECEMBER 2025
This brief provides 10 important best practices for economic development incentive design and implementation. These best practices are drawn from dozens of state incentive evaluations our team has conducted since 2020.
EVALUATING WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT INCENTIVES – AUGUST 2024
Incentives that connect businesses and workers are a growing part of the economic development incentive portfolio. This presentation summarizes evaluation findings on different workforce development incentives and offers lessons learned for program design. To learn more about our take on workforce incentives, see our article from the California Economic Development Journal.
ALIGNING INCENTIVES WITH EQUITABLE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT – MARCH 2019
This brief provides 10 important best practices for economic development incentive design and implementation. These best practices are drawn from dozens of state incentive evaluations our team has conducted since 2020.
CORE CONCEPTS:
-
Equity goals and incentive program purposes often overlap. Make the connection explicit.
-
Be intentional in incorporating equity goals during each stage of the incentive process.
-
Choose(carefully) metrics to assess progress.
-
Report on promises made and whether community expectations were met.
-
Use this process to sustain the commitment to equitable economic development.
ARTICLES AND REPORTS
EXCEEDING EXPECTATIONS – February 2025
CORE CONCEPTS:
-
The Tech Talent Investment Program is an economic development initiative to grow the technology workforce in virginia.
-
The program assures an educated workforce for the region’s technology companies and provides great career path opportunities for individuals.
-
GMU has exceeded expectations by graduating more computer science and engineering students than projected.
ENTERPRISE ZONE TRANSPARENCY STUDY – September 2024
CORE CONCEPTS:
-
This study describes transparency practices for a place-based economic development incentive program.
-
Good transparency practices are sharing the name of the incentive recipient, project location and characteristics, incentive cost and duration, and outcomes such as jobs created, investment made, and taxes generated.
-
Recommendations for improving transparency include strengthening data sharing among government entities and issuing summary assessments of incentive use and outcomes to complement transparency data.
LEAVING NO ONE BEHIND – June 2022
State and federal incentives to close employment gaps for people with disabilities have had limited impact. These incentives can be made more effective by removing obstacles to eligibility, integrating incentives with other workforce support services, and expanding marketing and outreach.
INCENTIVES FOR ENTREPRENEURIAL FIRMS – August 2021
CORE CONCEPTS:
-
This report provides guidance to economic development practitioners and policymakers on offering incentives to different types of entrepreneurial firms
-
Tax incentives are generally not the best structure for incentives to help entrepreneurial firms
-
Approaches that determine effective incentive use are fit with the entrepreneurial ecosystem, well-designed incentive program rules, awareness of and access to the incentives, total funding available, and active program management
REFLECTING COMMUNITY PRIORITIES – December 2020
CORE CONCEPTS:
-
Economic development that is equitable, inclusive, and outcome-driven for residents prioritizes community engagement and clearly links engagement to actionable initiatives with measurable results.
-
Sustaining engagement during the program design phase enables partners to co-create initiatives that incorporate people, place, business, and governance capacities and yield holistic, responsive solutions that transcend individual organizations and disciplines.
-
Formal reporting back to the community helps ensure that priorities continue to be reflected in economic development practices and indicates when course corrections are needed.
RETHINKING INVESTMENT INCENTIVES – 2016
CORE CONCEPTS:
-
This collection describes the types and uses of incentives worldwide and examines the institutional steps that extend their value.
-
Chapter by Ellen Harpel on cost-benefit analysis of investment incentives
-
Published by Columbia University Press
MEDIA
BioTalk - EP. 196
How Smart Incentives Shape BioHealth Growth – BioTalk Podcast May 2026
CORE CONCEPTS:
-
Ellen Harpel joined host Rich Bendis to talk about how incentives work, why state and local governments use them, and what makes these programs effective and accountable.
-
Incentives are available to support companies across the full business lifecycle, from startups and emerging firms to major regional investments.
-
I share how we help companies, communities and decision makers better understand the resources available to encourage sector growth, including financing programs, investor tax credits, and other support services.
-
We examine how recent biohealth activity in Maryland, DC, and Virginia reflects the importance of workforce development, site selection, public-private collaboration, and regional thinking.
Smart Incentives 4×4 Framework
Administering
Helpful Links
State Business Incentives Database • Good Jobs First Subsidy Tracker • Good Jobs Tax Break Tracker • NCSL State Tax Incentive Evaluations Database
The Pew Charitable Trusts Economic Development Tax Incentives • State Data Sharing for Evidence-based Policymaking
Making Sense of Incentives, Tim Bartik, W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research
At Smart Incentives, we’re dedicated to helping leaders make informed decisions that deliver real results. Our presentations, reports, and tools are designed to give you clear, practical guidance for building incentive programs that create lasting community benefits.