One of the main challenges for today's agricultural engineering and science in Europe is to boost concrete and successful innovation to produce more and, at the same time, in a more sustainable way. ICT and new intelligent systems such as robotics have a great potential to meet these challenges, as recognized by European and national agenda and policies. However, the innovation process is a complex process which often fails to reach the market, regardless of the potential of the technology used. A lot of studies and initiatives were made, in agriculture and other areas, to have a better understanding of this innovation process and to improve its working. These range from studying the spread of innovation and include the use of new technologies or systems to improve it, the involvement of end users in the innovation process, the acceptance of technologies and many more. These studies highlighted that success or failure of an innovation isn’t often due to technical or scientific problems but „generally involves ethical; social, management, organizational and institutional problems.”ii However, taking into account this complexity still remains difficult to study and manage. In this paper, a specific Public-Private Partnerships Action of the ICT AGRI Era-net is presented in the crop protection area. This one-year action aimed to gather together the potential players involved in the innovation process at the European level for crop protection and to boost two concrete innovation using ICT and robotics to reduce the use of pesticides. A collective work on „smart adjustments tools for sprayers‟ and on “combined robotic solutions‟ were made in order to develop innovation which would offer to farmers more intelligent machinery for crop protection. During this work, links with other similar European actions and networks such as ENDURE were made. The main interest of the study is the method used, based on value chain, but improved to encompass the whole complexity of the innovation process by integrating technological/scientific elements as well as sociological, economic or organizational aspects. The main conclusions of this study confirmed that a complex approach combining technological and social aspects is essential to understand and manage the innovation process. Some specificities of ICT innovation in agriculture, especially in this for crop protection, were highlighted at several levels (economical, social and technological). This first experiment on this methodology also pointed out new directions of research on innovation.