The seven short-listed companies for the National Innovation Awards, which are designed to highlight the importance of innovation and technology in Irish business and among the general public, have been announced.

The Irish Times and PricewaterhouseCoopers are cosponsors of the awards which are part of the Government's Science, Technology and Innovation Awareness Programme, run by Forfas.

The competition is divided into three categories for different sizes of business with Enfer Scientific winning last year's overall award for developing an innovative screening test for BSE.

This year the judges chose short-listed entries (the winners will be announced next week) from a range of businesses, illustrating that innovation applies not only in high-technology businesses, but in all areas of industry.

The short listed entries are:

IT Solutions. The Dublin-based company's entry in the awards is a software-based call centre simulator called Simone which allows companies to set up a model of a planned call centre and test out scenarios with any number of different variables.

The product offers companies the opportunity to raise productivity, improve customer service, justify investment and reduce costs by simulating the effect different actions would have on these factors.

British Telecom, Sony and Nortel have already bought in the software, while KPMG and Cap Gemini have decided to use it in their European call centre consultancy arrangements.

Netnote International: This Dublin company has developed a way of bypassing the need for expensive computers to access the Internet, by developing "webnote" which is an easy-to-use and low-cost Internet access device.

The product, which looks like a portable PC and is aimed at the consumer market, simplifies the whole process of accessing the Internet, eliminating the technology-fear of many people, and needing only a socket, standard phone line and smart card.

Using a full-colour touch screen, the user can - by tapping their choice with a pointer - surf the Net, or send and receive email instantaneously.

Odlums: Among the larger businesses which entered the competition was Odlums in Cork, which has developed a heat-treated flour that has allowed the company to diversify its customer base as the market for flour decreases.

The new product will allow the company to generate value-added products tailored to meet the needs of the food industry and other businesses. The modified flours are used in the manufacture of dried and carton soups, playdough, and batters used to coat fish nuggets.

Developed by a research team in Odlums over a number of years, the process used to manufacture the product is more flexible than existing processes both here and abroad, allowing the company to tailor-make flours for customers. [SBX]

SELC: The highly innovative systems for controlling public lighting developed by Mr Sean Noone in SELC in Belmullet, Co Mayo, have also been short-listed. The company manufactures a range of products which switch street and public lights on and off. These include light-sensitive public lighting controllers and Astro and Normal Time clocks which automatically adjust to compensate for seasonal time adjustments, thus saving on electricity.

SELC Astro Time clocks track the sun using complex in-built software algorithms to switch lighting on at dusk and off at dawn or midnight - or at another chosen time.

The company's customers include local authorities, electrical supply utilities, cities, and airport authorities worldwide. Its products are designed to greatly simplify the management of turning on and off lights for public authorities, allowing the system operators the ability to vary the intensity of the lights at different hours and to monitor faults.

MV Technologies: Detecting faults in the high-speed manufacturing of complex high-tech products such as circuit boards for mobile phones is MV Technologies' entry.

The Dublin-based company's artificial optical inspection product, the SJ-10 enables manufacturers to massively improve their efficiency and production costs by speeding up production lines, and reducing the inspection and measurement time.

The company's products are placed on the production line and check each circuit board as it passes along the line to ensure that everything is in the correct place, requiring very complex optical recognition and software capabilities. Among its major customers is the mobile phone company, Nokia.

Tellabs: Tellabs in Shannon has developed switching technology which allows telecommunications operators to deliver traditional circuit switched telephony over a broadband infrastructure. The AN2100 Gateway exchange, which was developed specifically for Sprint, is part of the next generation of voice/data switching equipment integrating circuit switching into ATM (asynchrous transfer mode) and IP (Internet protocol) broadband infrastructures.

The Tellabs product, developed in the Irish branch of this major multinational, allows telephone exchanges to operate more efficiently, using one relatively small piece of equipment to route both data and voice calls.

Filtertek: The company's IV or intravenous infusion therapy is used extensively in hospitals for the treatment of a wide range of conditions, but its new product caters for some cases where the infusion of a secondary solution into the patient is needed. It is crucial in this process that the two solutions are kept separate so that, for example, a powerful drug due to be given in small doses does not mix with another solution being given to the patient.

While most valves on the market exhibit some degree of leakage Filtertek's unique new check valve will allow two solutions to be infused without the risk of the primary solution, normally saline or glucose, mixing with the drug.

The valve was developed by the company in its Irish headquarters in Newcastle West, Co Limerick, following the detailed work of a product and process development team and a second generation valve is now being developed.