It was founded in October 2009 as a result of the Great Recession, and runs a variety of affiliated programs at major universities such as the Cambridge-INET Institute at the University of Cambridge.

INET was founded with an initial pledge of $50 million from businessman and philanthropist George Soros.

[2] The Institute has disbursed approximately $4 million annually in research grants to students and professors.

The Cambridge-INET Institute (co-funded with William H. Janeway) established an advanced institute for economic thinking at the University of Cambridge, The Cambridge-INET Institute was endowed with $3.75 million grant from the Keynes Fund for Applied Economics, Isaac Newton Trust, and the University of Cambridge Faculty of Economics.

[4] Similar collaborations exist with the INET at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, which was co-funded by James Martin, as well as the INET Center on Imperfect Knowledge Economics (IKE) at the University of Copenhagen.