This week, I joined the ABSL Western Balkans Conference in Sarajevo—a gathering that, for once, didn’t just ask how the region can ‘catch up’, but how it can lead. I spoke about positioning the Western Balkans to become future-ready and future-relevant.
The thought that kept coming back to me was this: disruption is not foreign to the Western Balkans. It’s the region’s oldest language. Political shocks, wars, transitions, economic collapses, recoveries—this part of Europe has lived through more reinventions in three decades than many regions experience in a century. Yet, every time, it finds a way to rebuild, reorganise, and begin again.
That experience is often treated as a weakness—a legacy of instability. But what if it’s the exact opposite?
What if it’s the region’s greatest competitive advantage in a world defined by constant disruption?
Keep moving when the rules change
Today’s global economy doesn’t reward the biggest, the cheapest, or even the best-prepared. It rewards the most adaptable—those able to rethink their models when conditions shift. And that, arguably, is something the Western Balkans has been training for all along.
Across the region, I see companies that have learnt to design around constraint. Teams that know how to keep moving when the rules change. Entrepreneurs who innovate not because it’s fashionable, but because it’s necessary. There’s a word for that: reinvention.
But here’s the paradox—while reinvention is embedded in the region’s lived experience, it’s not embedded in its strategy. Too often, countries still compete on familiar terms: low costs, educated talent, incentives, ‘strategic location’. The first slide in almost every investment presentation says the same thing. Yet geography is no longer strategy. The investors of today aren’t buying real estate; they’re buying readiness.
And readiness looks different here. It’s pragmatic. Improvised. Fast. It’s a WhatsApp message at midnight that gets the job done. A cross-border partnership agreed over coffee before the lawyers arrive. It’s informality, yes—but it’s also trust.
That’s the operating system of the Western Balkans. And instead of hiding it, perhaps it’s time to codify it—to make that combination of creativity, resilience, and adaptability the story we lead with, not the one we quietly apologise for.
Because the truth is, the Western Balkans doesn’t need to imitate Silicon Valley or Poland. It doesn’t need to chase someone else’s model of success. It needs to own its reinvention DNA—resilience with creativity, informality with trust, small scale with big adaptability.
A bridge between mindsets
That’s the real bridge the region can build: not just between markets, but between mindsets. Between the structured systems investors expect and the agility that’s already here. Between the desire for order and the talent for navigating uncertainty.
Of course, that means letting go of some old narratives. The ones that still measure progress by the number of industrial zones. The future won’t be shaped by who offers the lowest cost per hour, but by who can reconfigure fastest when the environment changes. And if we’re honest, that’s always been this region’s strength.
Because while much of the world is still learning to live with disruption, the Western Balkans never had the luxury of avoiding it. It learned to adapt in real time — and that muscle memory might just be its most valuable export.
The question now is whether it can see it that way. Whether governments, investors, and entrepreneurs can stop treating disruption as a threat—and start treating it as the raw material for something better.
In a world of predictable presentations and fragile systems, the Western Balkans could be the region that rewrites the rulebook.
It’s done it before. And it can do it again.
Photo: Dreamstime.
