This initiative aims at developing and promoting the concept of stakeholder-driven research.

Research funding decisions and research evaluation are currently almost exclusively based on peer-review. Peer-review is well suited to ensure quality, but helps little to achieve impact. ParticipatoryResearch adds the stakeholder dimension to research funding and evaluation. In an ideal world those research projects should get funded which will ultimately benefit its stakeholders most. Individuals (such as peer reviewers) can often hardly realistically access the potential benefit of a certain research proposal. Better results can be achieved by relying on the intelligence of a whole community by employing prediction markets (being the best general institutions we know for aggregating information). In such a prediction market for research ideas stakeholders bet or vote about which research results will benefit them most. The highest-ranked research ideas according to the stakeholder benefit should ultimately get funded.

The ParticipatoryResearch concept is based on the following principles:

• Transparency. Research is currently affected by various information flow barriers. Increasing transparency and openness with regard to research ideas, evaluations, reviews, research progress reports and interfaces between research results will help to remove information flow barriers and ultimately make research more efficient.
• Community intelligence. Funding decisions as well as success assessment should be primarily based on the judgment of a large stakeholder community.
• Big impacts with small steps. Conceiving and realising bright ideas does often not require hundred man-year developments or multi-million amounts of funding. Their realisation can be achieved by bringing together innovative ideas with clearly defined features and requirements based on direct stakeholder involvement.

In order to establish the ParticipatoryResearch concept, we aim at (1) developing a prediction market model for research funding, (2) implementing a Web platform for organising this market and the participatory research process, (3) persuading research funding agencies to use this platform for managing a part of their research portfolio.

A first step towards this goal was made with Cofundos – a market for open-source software R&D. Continue here to a brief overview on the ParticipatoryResearch concept.