The Foundation was created in 2004 on the initiative of Jérôme Monod, adviser to Jacques Chirac (former President of the French republic), with the support of the UMP (right-wing party).
[5][6] The Foundation for Political Innovation organizes its research work around four main topics : economics growth, ecology, values and digital.
According to the Foundation, and in line with its liberal stance, " the State is not meant to reduce inequalities" and should "give up some areas of competence" to the benefit of the private sector.
The same year, the foundation publishes a note on public broadcasting restructuring, criticized by Mathieu Gallet, Radio France's managing director.
In this note, Fondapol recommends that the public audiovisual sector should be reorganized around a lighter structure centered on the production and diffusion of cultural contents, differentiating it from private channels.
[9] In April 2017, the Foundation offered to review the public debt's evaluation criteria and its implications, in comparison with the structure imposed by the Treaty of Maastricht.
[11] In 2011, the Foundation for Political Innovation publishes a major international survey on youth, revealing that barely 47% of French aged between 16 and 29 are satisfied with the time in which they live.
The Foundation presented "worrying" results pertaining to the consumption levels of tobacco, alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, porn, and video games, as well as the usage of screens for 14-24 year-olds.
[13][14][15] Through a blog named Anthropotechnie, hosted by Elisabeth de Castex, the foundation studies more in depth the contribution of technologies to the field of health (telemedicine, big data, artificial intelligence, robotics or genomics).
In 2011, Eddy Fougier addresses for the Foundation the theme of resistance to new technologies, and movements denouncing “misguided” science, analyzing in particular the case of anti-GMOs.
[17] On the subject of artificial intelligence, Serge Soudoplatoff published in 2018 for the foundation a note highlighting what he refers to as "the three major ruptures of 2011" which allowed the development of artificial intelligence: the introduction of a more sophisticated category of algorithms such as convolutional neural networks, the arrival on the market of low cost graphic processors capable of performing a large number of calculations, the availability of large databases correctly annotated, allowing a finer learning.
[19] In 2017, Nicolas Bouzou and Christophe Marques published a note for the Foundation, on the theme "Hospital: liberating innovation", imagining the future of public health at the time of the NBIC (nanotechnologies, biotechnologies, big data and cognitive sciences).
[20] In March 2018, the Foundation's Executive Officer, Dominique Reynié, defended medical digitalisation, in particular telemedicine, in order to efficiently combat the lack of doctors in certain regions of France.
[27] In 2017, Fondapol publishes the results of an international survey (26 countries) on the evolution of the democratic sentiment and values in Europe under the title "Where is democracy going?".
Pezzardi and Verdier ponder the French State's current role in the fight against unemployment and job search, and on the way supply and demand work in the sector.
[36] Between 2015 and 2017, Fondapol has been a partner of the seminar "States, Religions, Laïcités: the new fundamentalists, national and international challenges" of the Collège des Bernardins.