Following the Name Identifier Summit in November 2009, where a cross-section of the research community explored approaches to address name ambiguity, the ORCID initiative was announced in December 2009.
The ORCID Initiative was an interim entity formed to explore these approaches, and ORCID, Inc. is the formal non-profit organization incorporated in August 2010 to apply the ideas produced by these explorations toward practically addressing the problem of name ambiguity.