Gates: 'I don't get out of bed for less than a billion'

Bill Gates, outgoing Microsoft chairman, claims the emergence of Asia as a superpower in innovation is an "overwhelmingly good thing".

Although the US and UK remain central to Microsoft's research and development plans it is the plants in China and India which are indicative of the way the industry is shaping up, he said.

"Microsoft has four major R&D centres," Gates told attendees at an Innovation Day event in Brussels. "One is in Europe [in Cambridge, UK]. We have our research centre in the US, which is the one that we started 15 years ago, and then we have one in China, and one more recently that we started in India."

And it is the size of those two countries' populations which made the choice of location an easy decision.

"Basically, wherever there is one billion people, we are putting in a research centre," said Gates. "When people ask me, 'When are you going to put the next one into my country?' I say, 'When you have a billion people, give me a call.'"

The sheer number of well-educated people entering the workforce in those countries means the rate of innovation will soar, he said.

Gates added that Microsoft is also working harder to foster relationships with major world universities, adding that such relationships are critical to innovation.

"We believe, very strongly, that universities have a key role to play. If you look at where in the US... new companies have been formed, it is not necessarily where the population is, it is much more correlated with top universities."

Delivering his keynote at the event, Gates said the world is on the verge of major developments in technology.

"We are really just at the beginning... the pace of innovation over these next 10 years will be much faster than what we have seen in the past," he said.

"The miracle of the microprocessor, delivering twice as many transistors every two years, is not receding. Likewise the doubling in disc capacity, which now enables us to carry our music and movies around with us, is continuing at an unbelievable pace."