Whereas “intelligence économique” was unknown in France up until the 1990s, it is now the subject of many scientific publications and professional courses. This article addresses the institutionalization of economic intelligence and its construction as a field of study over the last twenty years. It maintains that economic intelligence constitutes a discipline and that there is no geographical diffusion of economic intelligence but national emergences. This work interests in its appearance in France since the 1990s through the dual process of standardization of economic intelligence practices and the establishment of a scientific community characterized, as explained by Jovanovic (2008), by the creation of researchers groups, a common training and the affirmation of a specific method.