Europe benefits from leadership across a breadth of industries including automotive, avionics, ICT, medical equipment and industrial automation. Incorporated Smart Systems, including smart components (and in the future MNBS) often provide the key technical features for the competitiveness of products in these sectors.The objectives of IRISS are to hedge and extend competitive advantages of European industry in order to make Europe number one in the world in Smart Systems research and production. Therefore the CA focuses on improvements of the European innovation system in the Smart Systems sector which comprises• the formulation of a coherent strategy involving all major stakeholders• the opening of new application fields and markets• the intensification of cooperations in the Smart Systems value chain, paying particular attention to the inclusion of SMEs• the overcoming of fragmentation in the political landscape.The innovation focus of IRISS is to identify, examine and recommend ways to gain a European advantage in smart, integrated products and systems, with an emphasis upon engaging with user communities – in particular:• to establish applications-pull in a supply chain by engaging with user communities in fast-developing sectors, alerting them to the capabilities of Smart Systems and extracting their needs and ideas for introduction• to examine and put forward cases for focused effort in the manufacturing sector and health sector, which both promise to provide hubs for coordinated activity, combined with world benchmarking and a survey of the longer-term technology landscape• to draw together a network to support the implementation of its recommendations.IRISS includes 26 organisations, of which 16 are contractual partners (from 8 EU countries) and 11 associated. It covers the whole value chain from researchers to end-users. In order to reach its objectives IRISS makes use of the EPoSS structures and builds upon the results of the CA CEPoSS.