The strengthening of the Western Balkan R&D landscape and its eventual integration in the European Research Area (ERA) have long been important priorities at both Western Balkan and EU levels, believed to be critical for the stability and economic competitiveness of the region as well as for the potential accession of the individual Western Balkan countries to the European Union.

Against this backdrop, a series of supporting actions and initiatives over the last years have led to considerable progress in the S&T relations between the EU and the WBC region. Many of these activities have focussed specifically in the ICT arena (e.g. IS2WeB and Great-IST, SEE-INNOVATION, SCORE), but there are still important challenges both vis-à-vis the internal research vision and capacity in each country and the sufficient integration of researchers from the WBC into FP7 and the ERA. This presentation provides an overview of the most recent support actions fostering EU-WBC cooperation in the ICT research field. It moreover tackles important aspects such as WB regional ICT priority research fields, current factors hindering mutual collaboration so as to eventually put forward concrete recommendations on what the Western Balkan countries and the EU could further undertake in order to enhance the EU-Western Balkan R&D collaboration.