According to Dr. Ronald Pohoryles, Chairman & Director of ICCR International: 

"Ultimately, science and research ought to serve societal needs. The basic challenge is to grant the citizens social welfare as well as political and cultural participation, based upon a sound economy that in turn requires sustainable innovation. The knowledge based societies and economies require evidence based politics. Complex transformation processes led to an increased cleavage between specialised knowledge producers and the society at large, leading to mutual distrust. This is where social sciences come in: advise policies that provide equal opportunities; raise public awarness on science and technologies whilst ensuring that trust in science and technology is not abused by unresponsible scientists. Social scientist are trained to ensure rational politics and public participation based upon rational choice. Furthermore, social scientists can advise for comprehensive policies, reducing contractions between departmentalised public policy actors as well as enhancing interdisciplinary thinking in knowledge production".

Serve Societal Needs: Sustainable development of societies is at the core of the research interests of researchers of the social scientists. Citizens should be granted a high standard of social welfare, based upon a sound economy. Well-being is related to a sound environment as well. The work of social scientist deals with the concepts how best to ensure political and cultural participation to ensure the optimal representation of their needs in knowledge based socieities.

Informing Policies: Modern societies are quite complex and policy making is not easy. Decision takers are confronted with claims from different social actors and wise policy decisions have to balance different interests. Social claims are confronted with claims from economic actors to foster economic efficiency, environmental protection incures costs that might decrease competitiveness as well as the possibilities of welfare policies. This calls for "evidence based politics", the evidence and advice produced by social scientists. Social scientists cannot replace political decisions, but can foresee the consequences of different political concepts and instruments on the economy and on the society to ensure rational decisions of policy makers.

Improving Comprehensive Policy Making: Policy makers are concerned with specific tasks in different social realms. This can lead to policies that are not coherent. Transport ministries are interested to improve the transport infrastructure in a cheap and efficient manner. This might contradict the goals of the environment ministries that look at the environmental impact. Ministries for social affairs have to ensure efficient labour market policies that might necessitate expensive training programmes, ministries for health have to ensure the best possible medical provisions; the ministries for finance, however, are forced to ensure a balanced budget. Democracies allow for different political answers; social scientists can, however, help with the conceptualisation of consistent policies within different ideological options. 

Trust in Politics by ensuring the representation of the citizens' interests: Democracies need the legitimacy of political decision takers based upon the trust of citizens. Ensuring the trust in policy makers is vital for modern democracies. The informed citizens claim participation in the political game to improve public policy making; however, the claim for participation is not always just held by the informed citizens. Increasingly, concerns about "democracy deficit" is voiced; there is a widening gap between policy makers who have to take decisions on quite complex issues and claims of different civil society actors representing specific interests. Social scientists can "translate" between citizen action groups and politicians who soemtimes speak a different language or base their decisions on different grounds: environmentalists might privilege the protection of the environment at all costs. Policy makers have to look at other welfare issues as well. Business communities might just look at competitiveness; policy makers have to ensure social protection as well. Conversely, trade unions look at wage increases and better working conditions; policy makers have to ensure competitiveness. In helping to rationalise the conflicts and contributing to social bargaining processes by raising awareness, social scientists can contribute to the decrease the alienation between the political system and the citizens and increase of of trust in policy makers.