Economic Development Agencies

We help economic development agencies promote the growth of new local businesses.

Every state has economic development agencies whose goal is to encourage the growth of new local businesses by helping those businesses gain the skills needed to compete and flourish in the local, regional, national, and perhaps even global economy. Since this assistance often includes helping clients win a greater share of federal grants or gain private investors to fund research efforts, these agencies often award funding to companies who need assistance preparing formal government proposals or business plans.

Lytmos offers professional services and consulting support for economic program development. Our solutions include program management and evaluation services that enables economic development agencies to administer any grant or business plan competition. Our Proposal Preparation Assistance (PPA) service offering helps economic development agencies evaluate their clients' federal grant proposal or business plan concepts to determine which businesses show true promise of long-term growth and what additional assistance is needed to prepare a solid document.

Specifically, all of our evaluation services offer the following benefits to economic development agencies:

• Access to a highly qualified and diverse network of independent reviewers
• Rapid results--in a matter of days, not weeks
• An objective rating system that renders fair judgments
• Reports outlining reviewer consensus and comments on proposal strengths and weaknesses
• Effective communication with clients
• Real-time process tracking system, with exportable program data
• The ability to administer evaluations within budget
• Solid record keeping with a database that maintains records and facilitates reporting
• Minimum training and administrative support required
• No up-front costs

Our evaluation services also include branding features that allow Lytmos to operate "behind the scenes" on the agency's behalf. In other words, our branding features allow agencies to implement and operate the IPA, PPA, CPA, or Invention Assessment as their own, instead of developing an evaluation program with their own resources that could wind up being cost prohibitive and far too time consuming. By allowing Lytmos to operate on the agency's behalf, the agency is able to focus on service delivery with their clients, not the administrative tasks associated with managing an evaluation program of this magnitude.

In short, our evaluation services enable economic development agencies to offer the most effective assistance to their clients, helping those clients obtain federal funding or private investors and promoting their long-term growth. And they can do it all without incurring the development and full operating costs associated with such a feature-rich evaluation tool--the user-friendly, secure, and efficient Lytmos Process.