Google's top Australian engineer has some advice for Microsoft about innovation: let the staff at the bottom of the food chain bring fresh ideas to the table.

The Web search engine's Australian engineering director, Alan Noble, who heads a growing local team, was responding to comments made by Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer in Sydney last week.

The two companies have in recent years made marked incursions into each other's respective territories: Google in its move to develop non browser-based PC applications and Microsoft in its bid to expand its online capabilities.

Video: Steve Ballmer in town.

Google this week hosted a series of Web development seminars in 10 cities across the globe, including Sydney.

The Web search engine's Developers Day comes one week after Ballmer completed a well-guarded tour of Australia in which he met top business and government leaders.

Ballmer, who replaced Bill Gates as Microsoft chief executive in 2000, last week told about 400 business leaders at a Sydney luncheon of his company's strategy to "systematise innovation".

Gates, who founded Microsoft in 1975 and is regarded as one of the industry's original creative forces, is in the process of winding down his involvement with the company as chairman.

Ballmer said the burden of creative genius now needed to be shared across the group's senior management.

Noble said Google's and Microsoft's approaches to innovation were poles apart. "What Ballmer presented was pretty much a top-down driven response, almost reactive in that he said 'we need to figure out how to innovate better'," Noble said.

"He used the words 'systematising innovation'. "If it's so central to your culture there's nothing to systematise.

"It's there, it's like the air you breath -- you innovate to survive, there's nothing to systematise, it's just what you do," Noble said.

Google has adopted a number of unique R&D strategies, including giving its engineers what it calls "20 per cent time" -- one fifth of engineers' work hour allocated to designing new innovations that could one day wear the Google brand.

GMail, Google's Web-based e-mail service, was developed as a result of engineers' research time.

In contrast, Ballmer last week said Microsoft's approach to embracing innovation involved getting its top 200 managers to forecast key technological advances in five to 10 years' time.

But Noble said Google's model of decentralised research facilities allowed for greater innovation with less red tape. Google has established about 40 research labs internationally.

"You've got these organisations around the world and they're able to be agile and autonomous so you don't become this lumbering, monolithic entity," he said.