The pressing questions about governance today require research on a scale, and of a complexity, that the existing institutional environment for research has great difficulty supporting. This article identifies some of the current institutional constraints on governance research, and examines a set of institutional innovations that enable a form of 'big governance research' that begins to meet the information and knowledge requirements of contemporary governance questions. It presents the organisation and methodology of the multi-country study 'Modes of Service Delivery, Collective Action and Social Accountability in Brazil, India and Mexico' (henceforth BIM, for Brazil, India and Mexico). The authors argue that the organisational and funding model that this study has created permits the type of interdisciplinary, process-oriented, and multi-country or multi-region research needed to answer governance questions of international concern.