Despite the current hardships, global economy is expected to achieve a new round of growth in the next two decades powered mostly by innovation in information technology (IT), Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer (CEO) of Microsoft Corp., told a technology conference on Saturday.

"I think information technology more than anything else on the planet will be the source of the productivity and innovation that powers economic growth for the next 20 or 30 years," Ballmer said while giving a keynote speech at the annual conference of Hua Yuan Science and Technology Association (HYSTA), which was held in Santa Clara, the United States.

HYSTA was founded in the Silicon Valley in 1999 by a group of successful Chinese entrepreneurs with the aim of facilitating networking and the exchange of business ideas between Silicon Valley and China.

"We got ourselves as a global economy, certainly led here in the US, into a set of difficulties because we mistook, we were confused by growth that was triggered by borrowing money," Ballmer told the audience of hundreds of business executives, high-tech professionals and investors from both Silicon Valley and China.

"We confuse that for real growth, the kind of growth that comes with improvement in productivity and comes with innovation," he said.

Calling the current economic situations "very tough," the Microsoft CEO pointed out that it is also "an incredible time to innovate, to start new businesses and to grow businesses."

"As somebody who runs a company in information technology, there is no better time to dream, to innovate, to create," he said.

After 40 to 50 years of amazing inventions in the IT industry, "we haven't begun to scratch the surface yet in the information technology field in terms of what is possible," said Ballmer.

"There is productivity and innovation that's going to propel the economy to the next level, whether the innovation is directly coming out of information technology or indirectly," he noted.

(Xinhua News Agency October 4, 2009)