Most people concentrate on the first and don't give any thought whatsoever to the second. Eligibility criteria are always widely publicized by the departments while assessment criteria never are. It is the assessment criteria which ultimately determines whether or not your application is successful and it is the criteria which applicants know very little about, until now. One of the first criteria any proposal is assessed against is competitive impact or more specifically, the potential for adverse competitive impact on an existing business. You have to realize that government departments are very concerned about receiving bad publicity.
Senior bureaucrats are very nervous about embarrassing their political masters.
Remember that each department or agency is ultimately responsible to a minister, who is an elected official. The last thing any senior bureaucrat or politician wants to see is a businessperson running to the local media claiming that the government has put him out of business by funding his or her competitor. For this reason each application is examined for its potential of having an adverse impact on an existing business. Closely related to competitive impact is another criteria called net economic benefit . If funding your proposal creates new jobs and wealth in the local labour market at the expense of an existing business, then there is deemed to be no net economic benefit.