Pittsburgh's selection as the site of the G-20 summit is a "dividend for the pain" the city economy experienced in the past and the latest celebration of its incubating treatment of creative technologies, said Google CEO Eric Schmidt in an interview with the Post-Gazette.

The real innovations of the future, Dr. Schmidt said, will come not from a conference room but from a coffee shop. That's just the kind of environment already growing in Pittsburgh, and the approaching G-20 summit broadcasts that change to the world, he said to packed crowds at Heinz Field yesterday.

Dr. Schmidt delivered two talks with the Pittsburgh Technology Council and spoke with the Post-Gazette in between sessions. A frequent visitor and a trustee with Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Schmidt also highlighted Google's relationship with Pittsburgh, which houses a regional office of about 100 employees. It was welcome news from a titan of the new industry, the kind of celebrity only the Web could create: a rock star in gray slacks.

Google has put its money where its mouth is: The company purchased a CMU spin-off called reCAPTCHA last week. ReCAPTCHA determines if computer users are humans (and not automated spammers) by providing those squiggly-line word quizzes to Web sites. It also works with digitizing text.

The company was founded in 2008 by CMU computer science professor Luis Von Ahn, who said he was "very happy -- clearly" to have the acquisition most small companies dream of. He'll now work at CMU and Google.

Such startups as reCAPTCHA -- which has less than 10 employees -- bring to Google a Pittsburgh work ethic, a "pragmatism born of Westinghouse and Mellon," Dr. Schmidt said.

Pittsburgh Technology Council President and CEO Audrey Russo put it another way: It's a "get the work done" attitude, and it's not hard to find.

Dr. Schmidt's idea of a perfect workspace sounds a lot like Oakland: a merging of local businesses with campus quads. Not at all the stereotypical tech park, it's "slightly bohemian" and "messy" (Dr. Schmidt's seemingly favorite word).

"Pittsburgh is a prime candidate for the development of those parks, and you have them to some degree already," he said.

His outlook is the antithesis of industrial parks with parking lots and sidewalks. "If there's one approach that's guaranteed to not produce innovation, that's it," he said.

Take the famous Google culture -- an office style Dr. Schmidt described as "grown-up grad school." It's unorthodox, but it has a purpose: He called it a "mess by design."

The G-20 selection, while a perfect fit for Pittsburgh's narrative of recovery, also will help cultivate those communities, Dr. Schmidt said.

"Even the protests -- as long as they're nonviolent -- will help because they'll draw even more marketing to Pittsburgh," he said.

Constant access to global information has ushered in a new kind of company, what Dr. Schmidt calls a "micro-multinational" -- a small group of people who view themselves as having a global purpose.

He said while Google is no longer small, it maintains a global purpose.

The public's biggest misconception about his "midsized" company, Dr. Schmidt said, is that "we're more powerful than we really are."

Indeed, Google is seen as not just as a public company but a verb and an incomparable online force. Ms. Russo called its CEO one of the "key thought leaders of our time."

And he was in high demand: Guests started filing in seats an hour before Dr. Schmidt's scheduled speech.

One fourth-row attendee passed the time by solving a Rubik's Cube. And fans flooded the stage after his talk, armed with 30-second pitches or BlackBerries ready for a photo.

During two question sessions from the audience, his topics touched on health care, the financial crisis and worker visa policy.

"I want to talk about what I think will happen in the future," he said. But a lot of questions were more pragmatic, like the father who asked what advice to give his 15-year-old son, an aspiring programmer. Dr. Schmidt's advice: Keep gaming.

Dr. Schmidt said more queries are "fundamentally asking me if I'm an optimist or a pessimist" in his business sense. And he's an emphatic optimist.

Not that recent news requires disillusionment: Dr. Schmidt said Google has started to see rebounding behavior from advertising worldwide, which constitutes 98 percent of the company's revenue.

Dr. Schmidt said his leadership style became more nuanced at Google and more aware of the constant "shades of gray" that color top-management decisions.

"I wish everything were like cable news," he said, describing the predictability of a partisan good guy/bad guy outlook. It's not that easy.

"My job is to make sure we get to the right answer, not the consensus answer," he said. "Sometimes the only way to get to the right answer is have some dissent."

Or you can do what every great leader does and delegate.

Google's trademark logo is often revised to celebrate holidays or obscure events in history (a recent example pays tribute to H.G. Wells' birthday).

What would Dr. Schmidt's special G-20 logo look like?

"A picture of the rivers intersecting, with 'Google' along the way," he said, adding that he can't design well.

"That's not a core competency," he said. Not a very messy way to put it at all.