Widening countries are lagging behind as to many indicators related to R&I and participation in Framework Programmes. Looking through financial perspectives one can see rather slow improvments in their performance. As we all know, the most of the EU-13 countries, representing over 80% of the total EU-13 population, including Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, are so called āEmerging Innovatorsā placed at the bottom of the European Innovation Scoreboard. In our opinion, the low innovativeness of these countries results mainly from their development path in the past and the ongoing transformation of national innovation systems, which takes much longer than market changes in the scale of the entire economy. It should be emphasized that in EU-13 there are very skillful people and, in particular, we observe that a new generation of researchers and innovators is growing, the innovators with a great education and enormous potential, which is often wasted and "not working" for these countries, but also for the entire European Union. Only because of the existing barriers they often cannot break through with ideas and successfully finalize the process of implementing innovations. Various studies indicated several barriers such as low quality of proposals or lack of measures for effective opening the existing networks and matchmaking possibilities. Yet, the analysis do not focus enough over the capacities of R&I ecosystems i.e.: number of qualified Research Managers or favorable frames, including stabilty of R&I institutions in the regions. Those have a crucial influence on the decision to apply for funding under Framework Programmes. On the other hand they may be related as well to lack of trust on the side of advanced partners towards Widenind applicants. The session in form of panel discussion will concentrate on the aspects related to: a) promotion of Research Managers position in Widening countries, b) influence of instability of R&I ecosystems on participation rates, c) how to build trust as a base for future projects.
