This presentation defines business incentives three ways: programs designed to influence business investment behavior, taxpayer-financed programs that support individual businesses, and offerings that alter, reward, or subsidize an action or behavior. It identifies six incentive types — financial, tax, regulatory, workforce, site- or zone-based, and services — and notes that the number of state incentive programs has grown across the 1999–2025 period. It frames incentive use as a process rather than a transaction, and situates incentives within site selection, where workforce, infrastructure, site availability, and cost of doing business drive investment decisions while incentives play a role at each stage to maximize opportunity and minimize risk. It lists the design elements of good programs: clear and measurable goals, pay-for-performance, caps on outlays, limited duration, a targeted and discretionary application process, and built-in reporting. It closes with four takeaways: incentives should serve economic development goals rather than only winning deals, governments use many incentive types beyond tax breaks, economic developers can adopt procedures for sound decisions, and those procedures help answer whether incentives are working.