The high interest of the participants was evident from the constructive discussions addressing various aspects of the involvement of Western Balkan research teams into EU-funded research activities. The main recommendations towards research teams from the Western Balkans were:

• Exploit several ‘international collaboration instruments’ (beyond the ICT Theme under FP7 and HORIZON2020)
• Mobilise and create incentives for young scientists.
• Organise brokerage/networking activities to promote the research competencies of WBC M&C actors and support building international research consortia
• Ask assistant in preparing proposals for EU-funded projects.

The outcome of the discussions was published and is available in the section documents:  (please see the related articles).

Advisory group

The “Advisory Group” constitutes a community of experts in the design, development and implementation of systems and applications for Monitoring and Control. The goal is to offer a point of reference in the process of reinforcing the research collaboration among leading research teams from the EU and the Western Balkan Countries. The experts will complement the consortium’s efforts and suppport the early validation of the main project outcomes, increase their credibility and facilitate their wider possible diffusion. Meanwhile, through this 'interaction' key EU and WBC researchers will have the opportunity to exchange ideas and reach consensus on the research areas with a high EU-WBC collaboration potential, as well as on the actions required towards strengthening this collaboration.

First row (from left to right)
M. Krstic, M. Malek, L. Gavrilovska, M. Stankovski, E. Curkovic, F. Lamnabhi-Lagarrigue, M. Di Benedetto, S. Klessova, A. Konstantellos, I. Delioglanis, G. Rakocevic

Second row (from left to right
M. Colnarič, D. Petrovački, Z. Vukić, N. Nosović, Z. Ban, S. Engell, G.Stojanovski, N. Prljača, G. Dimic, D. Ristov, T. Wittig, Z. Ðurović,, G. Kvascev N. Filipovic, A. Salihbegović, D. Milicev, K. Pelivanoska, V. Milutinovic

The full list of experts of the EU-WBC advisory group (including short CVs and contact details) is available at the project website: Advisory group.

Source and further information is available here: http://www.balcon-project.eu