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This paper focuses on the genesis of innovation policies in France and on the emergence of economic knowledge devoted to governing activities linking science and industry. By examining the reconfiguration of the state and that of the bureaucratic space between 1956 and 1965, we seek to show that these two processes proceed from the same dynamic. The construction of science-industry relations as an object by economists made it possible for science-industry relations to be administered and for technological policies to be governed from the “centre.” Economic knowledge thus created new state capacities. It also led to the development of the economics of research as an autonomous sub-discipline within the economic sciences.