This article is part of a special series on growth – where will it come from and what can be done to stimulate it?

Nick Denys and Fiona Melville are leading members of Platform 10, a Conservative weblog campaigning for a modern liberal Conservative Party.

Fixing the economy – by reducing the deficit, paying off our debt and broadening the base for economic growth – is our government’s immediate priority, while changing society and the way people in Britain resolve their problems is the long-term aim. Since last year, the government has been focused on the macro problems: wrestling with bond markets, trying to introduce stability and certainty into the economy, and beginning the slow process of restoring pro-growth conditions. It has also been laying the foundations to facilitate a new way of operating.

Conservatives believe that it is not the role of the State to create jobs or growth, rather that it should establish secure conditions for private and social enterprise to flourish. Innovation and enterprise are messy, and suited to small, unknowable projects on a ‘failable’ scale, as Tim Harford has recently written (see the further reading links at the bottom of this article).

The Big Society is about supporting people to innovate to achieve growth in ways that the State could never imagine. Paul Romer, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, says, “Economic growth occurs whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that are more valuable.” But for this to happen, you need people to be free to have ideas, and for them to feel that they have the capacity within themselves, and the support of their peers and their government, to deliver them.

By opening up the State’s huge resources – of purchasing power, of manpower and venues, of data – the Big Society will offer more opportunities to those innovators to succeed. Research by academics Hanna Halaburda and Yaron Yehezkel demonstrates that growth occurs where competition is possible because it encourages new entrants to a market who aspire to beat the incumbent. Public service delivery, as much as the private sector itself, can and should benefit from innovation, choice and competitiveness.

Oxfordshire County Council have a clear description of what Big Society means to them: “Our overall vision for the Big Society is to create an environment where it is easier for our communities to do things for themselves about issues that matter to them.” They are encouraging an entrepreneurial, active mindset among what were previously passive service recipients. This kind of mindset is crucial because, as Carl Schramm of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation argues, growth is directly correlated with start-ups that get big: “The single most important contribution to a nation’s economic growth is the number of start-ups that grow to a billion dollars in revenue within 20 years.” The best chance of supporting them to success is having the widest possible spread of start-ups. The Big Society makes the base wider, thus increasing the chance that the next Facebook could hail from these isles.

Total UK government expenditure is now 43.7% of GDP – and what better way to encourage growth in the private sector and sustainable shrinkage of the public, than to open up public service delivery to social entrepreneurs? Most successful entrepreneurs begin with a stumbled-upon, key insight in an area they already know. They are more likely to be successful when they operate in clusters. And their ideas are more likely to succeed when they realise that others are trying to do what they do, but better. The Big Society gives greater rein to all three of those key entrepreneurial insights, making success more likely.

‘Growth’ in the public sector has, in the past, only ever meant growth in demand. But if local Big Society initiatives succeed, and the public sector can encourage private growth, successful concepts can expand to other parts of the UK, and in time, internationally.

People flourish when they feel able to determine their own future, and are sufficiently well off to feel secure. A smaller State – with greater freedom, better and more efficient public services, and a lower tax-take – is the best way to withstand the pressures we face from globalisation. The Big Society is the key way that we can encourage the growth our economy and our citizens need.