Current grid technologies offer unlimited computational power and storage capacity for scientific research and business activities in heterogeneous areas over the world. Thanks to the grid, different virtual organizations can operate together in order to achieve common goals. However, concrete use cases demand a more close interaction between various types of instruments accessible from the grid, and the classical grid infrastructure, typically composed of computing and storage elements. We cope with this open problem by proposing and realizing the first release of the Instrument Element, i.e., a new grid component that provides the computational/data grid with an abstraction of real instruments, and grid users with a more interactive interface to control them. In this paper, we discuss in detail the proposed software architecture for this new component, then we report some performance results concerning its first prototype, and finally we present a pair of concrete use cases, which the Instrument Element has been successfully integrated with