Horizons of Innovation Forum

The Forum is not another academic conference — it is a space where ideas become partnerships, and partnerships become joint European projects.

The initiative was created out of a recognised need: researchers and innovators from the region have the knowledge, enthusiasm and potential to participate in European programmes, but often lack access to the right contacts, information on current calls and the experience needed to build international consortia. The Forum steps in precisely at this point — not as a stage, but as an active environment for meetings, exchange and concrete agreements.

The Forum is designed as an annual travelling event, hosted each year in a different Western Balkan country. Through this approach, the initiative stays rooted in different regional contexts — each year bringing a new local ecosystem, a new circle of institutions and new challenges, while maintaining an unchanged vision of strengthening regional cohesion in research and innovation.

Each edition builds on the results of the previous one. Partners, contacts and ideas generated in one year become resources for the next — transforming the Forum from a series of one-off events into a continuous cooperation platform.

THE 2026 EDITION — BANJA LUKA

The third edition of the Forum arrives at a moment when the region has an increasingly clear picture of where it stands in relation to the European Research Area and what is needed to become firmly anchored within it.

The theme of 2026 - Beyond Participation: Building European Partnerships - reflects precisely this moment of maturity. It is not enough to merely “participate” in European programmes. The real ambition is to become a partner others seek out, who are wanted in a consortium, who are relied on for the next application.

Banja Luka hosts this edition. The Forum is organised by MOZAIK Hub, DIH ONEX, the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Banja Luka, and the Enterprise Europe Network/FINNO - a team with deep knowledge of the local research and innovation ecosystem and the capacity to facilitate quality exchanges that go beyond protocol.

WHO THE FORUM IS DESIGNED FOR

The Forum is designed for everyone active in research, innovation or development who wants to build or deepen connections with actors across the region and beyond. It is not a space for passive listening — it is a space for people who come with a concrete intention: to find a partner, understand a call, receive feedback, or simply start a conversation that would otherwise take weeks of back-and-forth by email.

Regular Forum participants include researchers and academic staff working on projects or planning EU funding applications; representatives of science and technology parks and digital innovation hubs; companies — especially SMEs — looking for research partners or wanting to understand how research can address their technological challenges; policy-makers and institutional representatives shaping development frameworks in the region; and organisations supporting international cooperation, such as the Enterprise Europe Network.

What unites them is not their sector or country of origin — but their intention to build collaboration that crosses borders.

HOW THE FORUM WORKS

The Forum’s format is deliberately designed to avoid the trap of one-way conference monologue. There are plenary sessions and panels, of course — but these are only the backbone, not the core. The core is the zones: relatively informal spaces in which the conversations take place that are the real reason people came.

The Research in Action Zone is for those working on a project or building an idea — pitching to evaluators, sharing experiences from real projects that went wrong, and discussing what industry actually expects from research collaboration. The Insights and Impact Zone offers something rarely found elsewhere: direct, informal conversation with experienced evaluators, without formality or pressure. The Collaboration Zone is dedicated to networking in the most concrete sense — brief presentations of organisational capacities, a poster session over coffee, and pre-scheduled bilateral meetings through the Enterprise Europe Network platform. And not to be underestimated: the relaxation area, because some of the most important agreements are made without an agenda.

Running in parallel throughout the day, EEN matchmaking provides pre-arranged bilateral meetings — researcher-to-researcher, researcher-to-company, company-to-company. These are not automated matchings, but purposefully scheduled encounters between those who have expressed interest in collaboration in advance.