This project, commissioned by the European Commission's DG-RTD and implemented by a consortium led by DLR-PT, develops strategic foresight to support R&I policy across ten EU candidate countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kosovo*, Montenegro, North Macedonia, the Republic of Moldova, Serbia, Türkiye, and Ukraine.
It explores how research and innovation systems may evolve across these ten EU candidate countries in the Western Balkans and Black Sea region, with the aim of informing EU, national, and regional policy choices under conditions of uncertainty.
The project combines desk research, a structured STEEPV-based trend framework, expert survey work, scenario development, and country-level policy dialogues to identify the drivers, uncertainties, and strategic choices shaping future R&I trajectories. Its first evidence base mapped 60 trends and drew on 338 expert responses across the ten countries, highlighting a shared pattern of weak implementation capacity, unstable funding, underused EU opportunities, and persistent talent loss.
Building on this, the project develops four cross-regional scenarios and expert co-creation, then translates them into ten country policy memos and a comparative regional analysis. The result is a foresight-driven set of tangible policy recommendations on how enlargement countries can strengthen R&I capacity, improve alignment with the European Research Area and Horizon Europe.
