From Stanford Research Institute to SRI International

Stanford University's trustees founded the Stanford Research Institute in 1946 as an applied research organization intended to support economic development in the western United States and to give the university's faculty and graduates an outlet for contract research with industry and government, structured from the outset as a nonprofit separate from the university's academic departments.

The Institute grew rapidly through defense, computing and engineering contracts over the following decades, contributing to work that included early computer networking research and the invention of the computer mouse, and by the late 1960s had become one of the largest independent contract research organizations in the country. Its closeness to defense funding made it a target of student protest during the Vietnam War, when demonstrators at Stanford argued that SRI's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded work effectively made the university part of the military industrial complex; the pressure contributed to SRI formally separating from Stanford University in 1970, becoming a fully independent nonprofit corporation. It adopted its current name, SRI International, in 1977 to reflect its increasingly global client base, while remaining headquartered in Menlo Park, California, near the university with which it retained an informal but no longer institutional relationship.