Measuring return on government investment in small business networking project

This paper discusses how to develop a comprehensive performance evaluation framework and measure quantitative and qualitative benefits of “Small Business Networking Project” which has been supported by Korean Government since September 2001. Employing BSC framework to identify various benefits realized from the project, we suggest specific procedure and method of deriving ROI (return on investment) for analyzing the benefits against the costs associated with the project, where we restrict our attention to the government investment. From the study, we show that ROI analysis can be served as a useful means to validate government projects as well as uncover specific problem areas to handle in the course of implementing them. Moreover, the ROI analysis we present in this paper can also be applied to pre-evaluate similar government investments.