J.E. Austin Associates, Inc.

Assisting Business & Government since 1986

Enterprise Development

Some of our recent experience includes:

Business is solidly at the center of economic growth and competitiveness; enabling strong, sustainable business performance is thus at the core of JAA’s mission, experience and expertise.

JAA’s methods and approaches for developing value chains, for encouraging investment, and for improving the enabling environment are all focused on their impact on the effectiveness of private enterprise. We are particularly effective in linking enablers of competitive business to the priorities of those businesses; business in turn has to be prepared to respond to and take up the opportunities that enabling actions provide. Workforce development, for example, is crucial to meeting the needs of business for people with appropriate skills. Improved regulation and services that are vital elements of the business environment have direct impact in reducing the risk experienced by investors in enterprise, encouraging longer-term strategies, investment in people, and investment in expanded operations, new technologies and market information.

JAA has been a key contributor to defining USAID’s and the professional services industry’s approaches to themes related to enterprise development. In the 1990s, our MAPS initiatives helped planners, development partners and the contracting industry to understand the role of business, the issues that it contends with, and its interactions with the enabling environment. Our work in microenterprise helped define the approaches to supply chain linkage and access to finance; and provided training to those organizations and professionals who work with microenterprise. Starting in 2000, JAA then introduced competitiveness methodologies to USAID, the World Bank, DFID and other agencies, and to many governments and business communities, as a means to enable business to develop its own capacities to identify and implement productive strategies. Our leadership in value chain themes focuses on implementation of value chain concepts through business action; in particular, by linking producers and small business with larger downstream business and markets.

Through USAID’s BGI program, which serves as USAID’s “think tank” for developing and disseminating new approaches centered on enterprise development, J.E. Austin Associates has introduced many exciting, highly impactful tools that are now being mainstreamed in economic development. Some examples include: the Enterprise Development Framework, Enterprise diagnostics (MEASURE tool), Replicable Business Models; best practice for buyer-supplier linkage, best practices for ICT and other sector specific development, approaches for business services development, and much more.