Referring to the increasingly challenging EU2020-ambition of Inclusive Growth, the objectives of the InGRID project are to integrate and to innovate existing, but distributed European social sciences research infrastructures on ‘poverty and living conditions’ and ‘working conditions and vulnerability’ by improving the transnational data access, organising mutual knowledge exchange and improving methods and tools for comparative research. This integration will provide the related European scientific community with new and better opportunities to fulfil its key role in the development of evidence-based European policies for Inclusive Growth. In this regard specific attention is paid to a better measurement of related state policies, to high-performance statistical quality management, and to dissemination/outreach activities with the broader stakeholder community-of-interest, including European politics, civil society and statistical system.For this purpose key actors of the related European Research Area are coupled in the InGRID consortium, representing specific data infrastructures and cumulated know-how. Pan-European optimisation of the infrastructure is created by organising an open, harmonised high-performance on-site access with an extensive visiting grant system.Joint research activities are conducted for the innovation and optimisation of the infrastructure. Key issues tackled in this respect include: the multidimensionality as a standard for poverty research; the problem of hard-to-identify and hard-to-reach vulnerable groups in data collection; the improvement of longitudinal and regional poverty mapping; the survey technology for linking vulnerability in working conditions with economic change and employers’ behaviour; the harmonisation of classifying jobs and skills; improving tools to generate comparative policy indicators; optimising the micro-simulation of policy impacts; and statistical quality management.