National Innovation Forum was held August 25th, 2009 in Lahti, Finland. Upon planning the next year's event, Seinäjoki Technology Center took earlier participant feedback very seriously - this year the participants were given a better possibility to interact with the presenters as requested, using sms based comments, as provided by the SMS2WEB feature of Widisys Wireless Event Manager service.

"Today we will use SMS to speed up the commentary process. No-one posing a question to the presenters does not any more have to rise, introduce himself and try to formulate a question probably ending up with an odd commentary somewhere between a question and a remark - instead, everyone can think and prepare well-thought, concise questions and comments to the presenters, and simply send them as an SMS message to the shown number. This way we can handle a lot more questions at the end of each presentation", guided the audience the chairman of the event, Mr Jari Kolehmainen from University of Tampere.

"At a boring event, SMS might be used to help the audience just pass their time. However, at an interesting event like ours, SMS is used to make the benefits of the event even bigger", reasoned Mr Kolehmainen.

National Innovation Forum program consisted of presentations on both public sector innovation policies and real-life case examples on applying innovative workshop methods on improving processes like Fazer's bakery product development and City of Lahti's public toothcare. Innovation was thoroughly challenged by the presenters; the mere interpretation of the word divided opinions, not to mention the ways to implement national strategies upon it. No wonder the program allured over 100 researchers and representatives of Technology Centers all around Finland to Lahti.

Innovation network coordinator, Ms Titta-Liisa Koivuporras from Seinäjoki Technology Center was happy about the vivid discourse activated by the text messaging service: ”The possibility to comment using SMS clearly lowered the barrier to participate in the discussion, and we managed to create the type of dialogue we were earlier missing”, she summaries.