The societal demands in Europe for health, security and safety, energy and the environment, and the market demands in nomadic, transport, communicationsn and entertainment products, demand innovations and technical leadership. Enabling embedded systems requires new challenging solutions like multi-physics devices, millions of interconnected nodes, very low power for autonomy, trusted and safe operations, and reliability. This talk introduces Thales' vision and research priorities for embedded systems and illustrates them through presentations of solutions and on-going research projects and initiatives. Thales' effort related to mission-critical systems is focused on advanced high-performance embedded computing platforms, on middleware technologies, on software systems design and verification tools for safety and security and on the emergence of open standards in these domains. Thales is also actively contributing to the development of innovation eco-systems: the joint undertaking ARTEMIS in Europe, and the "Pôle de compétitivité'' SYSTEM@TIC Paris-Region in France.