Professor Adrian Cheok was feeling a bit nervous. In October, he and his small team of postgraduate students learned that their invention was one of four finalists in the HackingBullipedia contest, and although the accomplished professor at City University in London, where he is also director of its Mixed Reality Lab, has received a slew of awards for his work on the interface between humans and computers, this contest promised to be different. For one thing, although there would be plenty of IT and computing experts on the jury, the most important judge was a chef. And not just any chef, but Ferran Adrià.

Cheok had reason to be apprehensive: Adrià is widely considered the most influential chef of our time. At his restaurant elBulli, located on the north-eastern coast of Spain, he revolutionised cuisine by bringing a radical, scientifically inflected creativity to bear on the process of cooking. The techniques and ingredients he developed in his kitchen and in his famous lab just off of Barcelona's Boqueria market – the foams, the sands, the liquids turned into tremulous globules via the magic of spherification – produced some startling dishes: "dragon" cocktails that made the drinker breath smoke; "caviar" made from pearls of olive oil; a robust plate of lapin royale made into gelatin. Hot into cold, sweet into savoury, solid into liquid or air, during the 27 years he ran the restaurant, Adrià played with his diners' expectations, undermined established categories of taste and texture, and constantly, miraculously, continued to surprise. "Presenting our prototype to him," explains Cheok, "is like performing a song for Michael Jackson."

Luckily for Cheok, Adrià won't be judging the team for its cooking skills, but for its imagination. Indeed, ever since elBulli shut its doors to the public in 2011, the chef has been busy turning the restaurant into the elBulli Foundation, the primary mission of which is to foster not just good cooking, but greater innovation in the kitchen and out of it. "I've been very successful, and very lucky, and now I want to give something back," he says. "And the best thing I can give is teaching others what I know, which is creativity."

Creativity was always at the core of what Adrià did as a chef. By marrying scientific techniques and processes to his wild imagination, he developed what he called "a new language" of cuisine. He and his cooks learned to use sodium alginate and calcium carbonate to turn liquids into "spherifications"; to employ liquid nitrogen to create a frozen parmesan foam; to add hydrocolloids to thicken sauces without flour or butter.

Few of these innovations were actually his inventions. Most of the novel techniques he employed had been used previously in industrial food production but had never before been applied to fine dining. And despite the sometimes mocking depictions of him as a test-tube wielding scientist, Adrià refused to distinguish his techniques as essentially distinct from anything chefs had always done. How was a PacoJet any more alien a machine than an oven? Why did we consider maltodextrose a processed "additive" and sugar a "natural" ingredient? Once when, in the course of one interview, a journalist enquired yet again about the gadgetry and chemistry-set cooking he had heard so much about, a mildly exasperated Adrià pulled the hapless reporter into the kitchen. "You want to see my technology?" he demanded. He grabbed the hand of one of the line of apprentice chefs busy shelling pistachios, and turned it over to revealing red fingers sore from hours of meticulous labour. "There's my technology."

In other words, Adrià rejected the notion that he was somehow breaking with what normal chefs did, just as he rejected the idea that his style of cooking represented a rupture with the centuries of cuisine that had preceded it. His style of cooking – often called "molecular gastronomy" although Adrià reviled the term – was an evolution, just as nouvelle cuisine evolved from the traditional cooking of France. Now, as he moves onto the next phase of his career, the ways in which he is bringing technology from other disciplines to bear on cuisine are evolving again.

"ElBulli never closed," Adrià says, "We just stopped serving meals." Indeed, ever since the chef stunned the food world in January 2010 by announcing he would no longer be serving food, he and his team, which involves a partnership with the Madrid-based telecommunications giant Telefónica, have been hard at work designing the elBulli Foundation. At first, its shape and purpose were noticeably vague ("The only thing I can tell you for sure," said Adrià at one point, "is that it won't be a cooking school. We won't be teaching anyone to break down a cod.") Three-and-a-half years later, however, several concrete projects are underway.

Perhaps the easiest to understand is elBulli 1846. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to call Adrià and his crew hoarders, albeit very, very organised ones. Over the years, they have kept track of just about everything, from the prototypes for spoons designed to serve the restaurant's famous spherified olives to Adrià's tasting notes on a black-and-white sesame dish called ying-yang, with a slew of magazine covers and cartoonist Matt Groening's depiction of Ferran in full The Simpsons style. All of those items will be on display in a new museum and archive that will be housed in Roses, the town on the Catalan coast nearest to elBulli (the 1846 refers both to the number of recipes created at elBulli in Adrià's time there, and to the year in which the famous French chef Auguste Escoffier was born.) Adrià says he expects 200,000 visitors a year to the museum.

Eight kilometres up a winding coastal road to the village of Cala Montjoi, the former restaurant will become a research centre, named elBulli DNA, and will form the second of the foundation's key projects. There, the old tchotchke-filled dining room and sleekly modern kitchen will be preserved intact, but will be complemented by new buildings with vaguely organic shapes that recall both Gaudí and Alice in Wonderland, to be designed by the Catalan architect Enric Ruiz-Geli. The complex will include administrative offices, a screening room and archives, but its beating heart will be the old elBulli kitchen, which will be transformed into a hive of culinary experimentation of the sort that Adrià and his team used to conduct at their workshop in Barcelona during the six months that the restaurant was closed each year. But instead of inventing new dishes or techniques for the restaurant's lucky diners, the cooks will be sharing their findings with the world.

Thanks to support both financial and technical from Telefónica, the elBulli DNA test kitchen promises to be among the most advanced in the world. But with Adrià's new emphasis on spreading ideas instead of just fomenting them, it will also be tailored to promote different kinds of interaction. Each day, the fellows at elBulli DNA will upload the results of their work so the rest of the world may follow. Sensors will be used to track both the people and the tools used to prepare a dish, to enable those trying to recreate it in a kitchen in Singapore or London to do so with greater precision. Screens within the kitchen will make it possible for a cook in the cold station to see what another is doing at the stove. And interfaces that rely on gesture rather than touch will enable cooks whose hands are otherwise occupied to access the online database. Other innovations, says Maria José Tomé, innovation manager at Telefónica R&D, are sure to come. "Ferran sees things in a different way," says Tomé. "We are working with him in part because we want to support innovation, and in part because we see this as a way of generating new opportunities for the company, new products that accelerate the creative process and that we may be able to commercialise."

One of elBulli DNA's first projects, already underway, is to develop a comprehensive classification – a taxonomy, of sorts – of all food products: their biological origins, their relation to other foods, even how they got their names. "You can't fully create if you don't understand what you're working with," Adrià says. "What's the difference between ravioli and empanadas? They're both dough stuffed with something. How can I come up with a new take on them if I can't explain what each one is?" At a gathering with chefs and seed breeders in New York in September, he delighted in approaching the scientists and asking each to explain the difference between a fruit and a vegetable. "You see?" he would cackle as one after another stumbled over the answer. "We don't know anything. I'm Ferran Adrià, I've been cooking for 30 years, and even I don't know the answer to something like that."

The taxonomy will be created in-house, and turned into software that culinary schools and other institutions can use. Those characteristics distinguish it from the foundation's third great initiative, named Bullipedia. The goal of that database, however, is no less daunting. In the modest language of its creators, it will "organise in a clear, ordered and precise way all culinary knowledge". Luckily, Adrià and his team will have some help: the database will be created by the same professionals for whom it is intended. Culinary schools, restaurants, and universities will all contribute.

Although the comparisons –including in the name – to Wikipedia are unavoidable, the Bullipedia will not be based on crowdsourcing per se, but rather on the work of a select, vetted group of contributors. And because it is important to the foundation that all the information in the Bullipedia be absolutely accurate (another difference from Wikipedia), the foundation will provide the documentation and templates that contributors need to craft their entries.

What that means in practice remains to be seen. But planners – including researchers at the University of Barcelona, which will oversee the Bullipedia – are working with the idea that a user searching within the database for information on, say, broccoli, would come up with entries that included not only recipes for dishes simple and elaborate, but also biological information on brassicas, suggestions for flavour pairings, information on optimum growing and harvesting conditions, techniques for cooking and preserving it, and notes about where the next steps in broccoli innovation may lie.

Does the world – even the rarified world of chefs – really need so baroque a compendium of knowledge? But Adrià's motivation for compiling and organising goes far beyond the mere knowledge itself. "Order, order, order, that's how you create," he says. And indeed, both the genome and the Bullipedia can be seen as continuations, albeit on a much grander, more comprehensive scale, of the archival work that Adrià and his team used to do back when they were actually feeding people. From early on, the restaurant meticulously catalogued its work, not just the successful recipes and techniques that made it into the dining room, but the hundreds of failures along the way. That tedious labour may not fit most people's romanticised vision of inspiration, but it was critical to Adrià's creative process. If he got a notion to come up a new dish featuring pine nuts, for example, he could go back through years of notebooks to find everything he had ever done to them – cooked them in a creamy broth to make a pine nut risotto; infused them in pinecones filled with boiling water for a pine nut tea – and build from there.

The Bullipedia takes that basic idea, that from order comes the anarchy of creativity, and multiplies it a thousand-fold. By taking what was originally a purely written form of documentation – later, Adrià's crew would also take photos of finished dishes – and making it digital, the information contained in the Bullipedia will be available to anyone with an internet connection. By making the compilation of knowledge interactive, it guarantees that the Bullipedia will remain a living document, able to change and react to any new invention or discovery.

To jump-start the collaboration, Adrià and his partners from Telefónica launched the Hacking Bullipedia contest. The competition drew dozens of entries. Cheok's submission was one of the four finalists It is for a device that uses electric stimulation of the taste buds, coupled with a chemically produced scent emitted from a device that attaches to a mobile phone, to reproduce the flavours of any food or dish. "This is a new kind of virtual reality that allows users not just to see food on the internet but to taste and smell it," he says. Cheok imagines that the invention could be useful to a chef who, in looking through the Bullipedia, wanted to know what the spherified olives she read about there tasted like, or who wants to use the knowledge contained within the work to create new flavours altogether.

Is all this folly? With anyone else, it would be easy to say yes. But Adrià has been called crazy before: when he decided to close six months of the year; when he opened a workshop dedicated solely to experimentation. In each of those cases, and in many others, he triumphed. And throughout, Adrià has been consistent in his evolution. In fact, all of the changes described above were undertaken in the quest to keep alive his remarkable ability to innovate.

Back in January 2010, when the Catalan chef announced that he was closing elBulli, the idea that so successful a restaurant would voluntarily close was unthinkable to many, and foodie circles speculated that an ugly reason – health problems, money issues, a brewing lawsuit – lay beneath the unexpected decision. But in a world in which boundless ambition is taken as an obvious good, the truth was even more scandalous: Adrià closed the restaurant in order to keep doing what he had always done best, which was not to make money or be successful or even to cook, but rather to innovate.

Three years later, as the elBulli Foundation's shape coheres, Adrià is more enthusiastic about the project than ever. "I'm no longer interested in creating dishes," he says. "I'm interesting in creating the creators of dishes."