National Evaluation of the Local Enterprise Growth Initiative
CLG commissioned Amion Consulting to provide an independent, objective evaluation of the Local Enterprise Growth Initiative (LEGI) in order to inform Government decision-making and to identify and spread good practice.
Infonomics role has been to help analysis the scale and nature of funded activity and to advise on the econometric methods being used to estimate impact. Infonomics has provided support with the:
- preparation of logic models for many different types of enterprise support to provide a context for the evaluation;
- collation of financial and output monitoring from a diverse range of data sources provided by each of the 20 LEGI programmes;
- development of a system for interpreting a diverse set of output measures into a standardised set for aggregation;
- development of a meta-data system for activity classification: this has allowed for a non-exclusive, non-hierarchical assessment of activity‚ in lay terms, we allow for projects that are simultaneously providing e.g. training and mentoring rather than forcing the projects into 'pigeon-holes';
- clustering of activity types: displayed using heat-maps and tree diagrams to identify common patterns of support, relationships between activity and gaps. This has provided an evidence base for segmenting projects nationally across all of the local programme;
- analysis of outputs and finance: programme classification (enterprise growth versus social inclusion), spend density, target segmentation (businesses, people, start-ups, and place), comparison of allocation with spend, discussion of LEGI spending in the context of Area-based Grant (ABG).
local-enterprise-growth-initiative impact-evaluation evaluation