The project aims at encouraging closer scientific and technological (S&T) cooperation between Europe and the Western Balkan countries (WBCs: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, FYR of Macedonia and Serbia) in the area of surface transport. It further seeks to establish an EU-Balkan transport network of researchers, universities, industry and experts among these countries in order to improve and enlarge the research capacity of Western Balkan centres of competence in terms of research programmes and human resources through transnational placements of research staff and knowledge.

TransBonus provides the following opportunities to the target groups:

• Participation in the currently open call for pre-proposals – proposals for research ideas. The main objective is to urge the active participation of research organisations, NGOs, universities, public organisations, and SMEs coming from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the FYR of Macedonia, Serbia and Bulgaria in future EU projects in the field of surface transport under the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Development (FP7).
• Becoming a partner of a European R&D project for the surface transport sector.
• Participation in the “Idea Generation Events” – the aim of these events is to establish partnering schemes among WBCs and EU members and simultaneously to facilitate knowledge transfer through generating proposal ideas in the field of surface transport.
• “Expert study visits” – authors of the best two to three project ideas per country, in the particular sector of interest, will have the opportunity to take part in study visits to meet experienced partners for setting up research project consortia for the calls for proposals described above.
• Support in the development of the full project proposal for the relevant FP7 call.

Major outputs of the TransBonus project include a mapping report, analysing the current status of the research potential in the field of surface transport in the WBCs and a brief FP7 handbook describing to partners from the transport academia how to participate in FP7 initiatives and offering them full information on financial and legal aspects of the programme. Furthermore, the project website, http://www.transbonus.net, makes finding information about specific topics in surface transport research much easier for the transport research community from the WBCs. It also contains a systemised database of the surface transport centre and individual researchers.