Born in the wake of the First World War, the International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation claimed to play an important role in the development of scientific exchanges, which had to be reconfigured after the conflict. This role, however, was not limited to reactivating the links prevailing before the war : it also consists of supporting the institutionalization of scientific research, threatened both by manpower problems and by the temptation by some governments of returning to the status quo ante. Through its international network, the ICIC and the IICI served as a fulcrum for national initiatives to sustain funding for science. In this respect, the ICIC and the IICI are ones of the actors that contributed to the emergence of an institutionalized scientific research during the Interwar period. This paper aims to evaluate their action through three projects carried out by the ICIC/IICI: the fight against the crisis of intellectual work, the investigation about the resources for science and the promotion of the scientific property. Our contribution will seek to understand how the action carried out within the ICIC and then the IICI was able not only to emerge from national initiatives but also to reinforce them and how the absence of tangible results could hide fruitful failures.