<div><p>Innovation can turn the world's foreboding future bright, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said Monday in an annual letter from a charity foundation he runs with his wife and father.</p><p>"If we project what the world will be like 10 years from now without innovation in health, education, energy, or food, the picture is quite bleak," said Gates.</p><p>"Society under invests in innovation in general."</p><p>Important areas where such investment is lacking are innovations that benefit poor people, education, and preventative health care, according to Gates, who retired from Microsoft in 2008.</p><p>The world struggled with a fierce financial crisis during his first year working full time at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation he and his wife established in 1994.</p><p>"The neediest suffer most in a downturn," said Gates, who noted that he consulted powerhouse billionaire investor Warren Buffet while assessing the economic landscape.</p><p>"Although the acute financial crisis is over, the economy is still weak, and the world will spend a lot of years undoing the damage."</p><p>Gates Foundation has allocated billions of dollars in grant money for vaccine research, drought-resistant corn, low-cost mobile bank accounts, systems to evaluate abilities of school teachers, and more.</p><p>"We are backing innovations in education, food, and health as well as some related areas like savings for the poor," Gates said.</p><p>"Despite the tough economy, I am still very optimistic about the progress we can make in the years ahead."</p><p>Without innovation, health care and energy costs will spiral upward, Gates predicted.</p><p>Gates added that a key goal must be to find a greenhouse gas-free way to produce electricity that is cheaper than burning coal to generate power.</p><p>"There will be a huge market for this, and governments should supply large amounts of funding for based research and development," Gates said.</p><p>The Gates Foundation has yet to back research into clean sources of electricity, but Internet giant Google has been investing and offering grants for research in such technologies.</p><p>"The most important innovation required to avoid climate change will be a way of producing electricity that is cheaper than coal and that emits no greenhouse gases," Gates wrote.</p><p>Gates revealed that he will keep an online journal of sorts, logging muses about trips, books, meetings and other matters he finds interesting at a gatesnotes.com website.</p><img src="http://admatch-syndication.mochila.com/images/ad.gif?aid=67765912&bid=informcom" /></div><div id="copyright"><div>

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