The performance evaluation is now in France, in the heart of the reforms of higher education and research. The purpose of this paper is to measure the effects of new performance indicators on the representations of management teams and overall university in the innovation process in the phase of appropriation by the actors. Faced with the paradoxical effects generated by mobilizing the notion of performance at the University, the actors, through the exercise of their autonomy taken or granted (or imposed), ownership (for contextualisation) inventions for instrumental evaluation legitimize them and control them.