The creation of the Agence de l’innovation de défense: An institutional innovation[La création de l’Agence de l’innovation de défense : une innovation institutionnelle]

The Agence de l'innovation de défense (acronym AID in French) was created in 2018. This is an institutional innovation in a structured and stable field, that of defense. The aim of this new agency is to bring together, in a single structure, the Ministry's former scattered innovation management systems, as well as the new "open" innovation systems. The latter are designed to capture and rapidly exploit innovations from civilian players. How can we analyze the process that led to such innovation? In this article, based on a narrative of the creation of the AID and a series of interviews with players in the defense community, we propose to show, on the one hand, that this innovation is the result of crystallization, and, on the other hand, to highlight three dilemmas, echoing the title of Christensen's book (Christensen, 1997), specific to institutional innovation: that of subtle or restructuring creation; that of adaptation or creation; and, finally, that of attestation. The case study enriches the theory of institutional innovation formulated by Van de Ven and Hargrave (Van de Ven and Hargrave, 2004; Hargrave and Van de Ven, 2006), which identified only one of these dilemmas (adaptation versus creation), rethought on the basis of the notion of subtle innovation.