Business Support: is market confusion just a red herring?

Like many people in my game, we have been handed over the Business Link brand to deliver and a bunch of service level agreements and targets. The wider choices are in the long term delivering a more cohesive enterprise support system that has some rationale aligned with local and regional needs.

And I keep hearing about confusion in the market place as being a big issue. I am not that convinced yet for several reasons:

- I have not seen any tangible evidence that 'confusion' is a really bad thing, or has really market negative economic or business impacts
- I think the big question is over managing how the client interfaces with these services
- I think its overkill to design a whole range of projects and services on the basis that duplication is the big problem. No.1. priority for me is to cope with these three questions - (A) are the right services, incentives, forms of help in place - (B) is their a sound market failure and impact/benefits rationale for this - and (C) can the businesses that need these services and are experiencing market failures or aren't realising their potential access them?
- Too often we're stuck in the poor public sector interpretation of things and end up pissing about with structures. Which leads to monolithic arrangements. I point to Scotland to an enterprise support system that monolithic and akin to a network of NHS Health Centres rather than a dynamo for entrepreneurialism.

Anyhow - show me the big bad negative impacts of 'confusion' someone please?!