Investigating the structure of the orbit space of a Lie groupoid leads to the notion of a smooth stack. For instance, the orbit space is a smooth manifold if the isotropy groups are trivial (as in the example of the Čech groupoid), but it is not smooth in general. The solution is to revert the problem and to define a smooth stack as a Morita-equivalence class of Lie groupoids. The natural geometric objects living on the stack are the geometric objects on Lie groupoids invariant under Morita-equivalence: an example is the Lie groupoid cohomology.