The Institute for Research on Learning (IRL) was a research group in Palo Alto, California founded by George Pake in 1986 through a grant from the Xerox Foundation, as a spin-off from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Corporation which Pake founded in 1970.[1] It was a nonprofit research organization that looked at learning in a wide variety of settings, including schools, workplaces, and informal settings, using collaborative, multidisciplinary terms. Research questions were based in real-world problems and settings defined in collaboration with the institutions who hired IRL. IRL had a significant impact on education and knowledge management (among many other fields) not only in the US but globally because of the development of the community of practice idea.