A road map for big society research and impact

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"Big Society Research"(www.bigsocietyresearch.com) was a networking project that brought together academics from multiple disciplines as well as governmental, charity and private sector individuals to discuss existing research relevant to the 'big society', to identify research gaps, and to brainstorm future research directions.The project ran four interdisciplinary workshops, each based around a central theme relevant to 'big society'. Key gaps identified were: (1) Lack of an evaluation framework for planning and measuring social innovation interventions. Despite hundreds of case studies in citizen-led societal change, there is no single repository for lessons learned and few guidelines for future initiatives; (2) Lack of research into institutional structures that support localism. Universities and organisations are often structured in a way that is in conflict with citizen-led initiatives (cf. the individuality of PhD study). Research should be undertaken to suggest new organisational structures; (3) More research into the concept of 'listening'. A big issue in any locally-oriented initiative is the ability to listen to a full cross section of community voices; (4) There is a need for a structural macroeconomic model to analyse the current faults in the system and to evaluate from an economic perspective the value of localism.