In 2006, the Centre Pompidou founded the Institute for Research and Innovation on initiative of the philosopher Bernard Stiegler. The institute has been created as part of the Centre Pompidou to anticipate, accompany and analyze the transformation of cultural practices enabled by digital technologies, and sometimes even to contribute to their very emergence.

In August 2008, the IRI attained the status of an independent research association whose administrative board members are the Centre Pompidou, the Centre for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona, Microsoft France, the Goldsmiths College – University of London, the University of Tokyo, the Institut Telecom, the ENSCI, the Alcatel Bell Labs and France Télévisions. The Strate Collège Designer and the Art School of Beads are research associates.

The IRI primarily explores the field of digital studies, in the sense of a new « organology of knowledge » appearing with the digital, which requires specific studies and concepts, and which shifts the whole contemporary episteme (as defined by Michel Foucault). More precisely, the institute investigates the field of cultural and cognitive technologies from a digital humanities point of view, which  at the IRI is considered to be a specific sector of digital studies. The IRI thus aims at participating in the development of new forms, devices and technologies: to address the public, to facilitate contributions and collaborative criticism; to provide solutions for editorial and interconnectivity in the domains of culture and knowledge. To achieve this, the IRI will both theorize and formalize the relevant technologies and the social practices they induce, as well as develop cultural and scientific applications, especially in and around the museal domain, but also more generally as technologies for amateurs.

The research program of the IRI illustrates the objects of the current theoretical and technological research:

●        Ecology of attention
●        Figures of the amateur
●        Design of the new industrial world
●        Philosophy and Web Engineering and meta data
●        Relational technologies, social networks and tools of transindividuation
●        Mobility and motivity in cultural practices.