I am not a creationist (though I am a Christian) and thought the debate was painful to watch. That being said, the Discovery Institute is not a Creationist organization or even specific to Christianity. Intelligent design is not creationism, nor is it a religious position. It is the application of design theory to the natural and living world.
As for science or research - from the new intelligent design research lab, there was discussion of two technical articles published in the Journal of Molecular Biology by protein scientist Doug Axe (for abstracts, see here and here). As the New Scientist acknowledged, funding for the research underlying these peer-reviewed articles was provided by Discovery Institute's research fellowship program--thus disproving the twin canards that Discovery Institute does not support scientific research, and that pro-ID scientists do not publish peer-reviewed research.
For more ID papers see HERE or HERE
Excerpt from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1844, p. 464:
As this chapter is written in the early twenty-first century, the hypothesis that the universe reflect intelligent design has provoked a bitter debate in the United States. How very different was the intellectual world of the early nineteenth century! Then, virtually everyone believed in intelligent design. Faith in the rational design of the universe underlay the world-view of the Enlightenment, shared by Isaac Newton, John Locke, and the American Founding Fathers. Even the outspoke critics of Christianity embraced not atheism but deism, that is, belief in an impersonal, remote deity who had created the universe and designed it so perfectly that it ran along of its own accord, following natural laws without need for further divine intervention. The common used expression “the book of nature” referred to the universal practice of viewing nature as a revelation of God’s power and wisdom. Christians were fond of saying that they accepted two divine revelations: the Bible and the book of nature. For desists like Thomas Paine, the book of nature alone sufficed, rendering what he called the “fables” of the Bible superfluous. The desire to demonstrate the glory of God, whether deist or – more commonly – Christian, constituted one of the principal motivations for scientific activity in the early republic, along with national pride, the hope for useful applications, and, of course, the joy of science itself.
Courts have ruled that ID is a form of creationism, and have thus disallowed its being taught in school science classes. Without getting into too much detail, I'll just say that ID was invented to put a scientific veneer on creationism. In reality, neither ID nor creationism have any scientific basis, and their resemblance to anything in the Bible is fairly thin, as well.
The articles you linked by Doug Axe are only available for a price from ScienceDirect. I found him as an author of 9 articles indexed in PubMed, of which 2 are free access. One of them predates his association with the Discovery Institute, but with the other, I was able to see that he is funded by Discovery Institute, through their "Biologic Institute." The research done at the Biologic Institute seems limited (very few researchers and limited labspace is my impression), but, as far as I can tell, is pretty standard research which fits into everything we know about evolution.