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Like all geniuses, Steve Wozniak is a seething mass of eccentricity. "I've become such a number person that when I come to a hotel, I don't look at the bed and the view, I look at the number on the door," he told the London Business Forum (LBF) at Waterloo's BFI IMAX cinema. "Is it a prime number? Is it all binary digits? I'm in a good room this time: 110. All binary computer digits."

We were here to learn about innovation from the co-founder of arguably the world's most innovative company, Apple. But it was the weird, intense, inspiring character of the man that made this such a memorable experience.

Wozniak has a squat, stocky appearance and a near-permanent smile on his face. He's like an affable version of Gimli from The Lord of the Rings. He talked very quickly, as if his tongue couldn't keep up with his brain. And, at 58, he had clearly lost none of the energy or enthusiasm that made him a millionaire in his twenties. Yet without the business head of Steve Jobs to commercialise his ideas, we might never have seen the inventions of "the Wizard of Woz" at all.

"I would design anything for free. I did all this stuff voluntarily, because I loved doing it," Wozniak said. "At college [the University of California at Berkeley], people would want papers typed and I'd say: 'I'll type your paper.' And I'd type it until four in the morning because I loved typing so much, and would never charge a cent... When you do things you love, you'll do them without worrying about money."

As a child, Wozniak developed a taste for electronics and mathematics that saw him build his own gadgets and break into technical libraries for information, as well as certain work ethics that would stay with him for the rest of his life. "I made up a game," he said. "And this game is really where all my skills in life came from with computers. The game was: how could I design the same thing better?" He explained that at a time when all computer systems were hardware-based, cutting down on the number of chips they used could result in major cost savings.

Wozniak became so good at the game that he could redesign computers typically with half the number of chips they were given by their original manufacturers. It wasn't just a question of cost but one of elegant solutions, Wozniak explained. "When you look at something that's designed with very few pieces, even if it's a house, it is easier to understand what it is, how it works, how it was built and where it came from. It's kind of like that Occam's Razor principle: the simplest solution with the fewest steps is probably the right one."

Shortly before he graduated from high school, Wozniak told his father that he wanted to own a computer one day - even though, at the time, a computer could easily cost as much as a house. Specifically, he wanted a Data General Nova minicomputer. This rectangular box, covered with switches and lights, was big by the standards of today - about the size of a photocopier - but at the time of its launch it was, comparatively speaking, an objet d'art. And that's certainly how Wozniak saw it. He had posters of the thing on his bedroom walls, much like the Apple fans of today pay tribute to design icons such as the original iMac, with its translucent "Bondi Blue" shell.

Wozniak got his first industrial experience while taking gap-years from college to raise tuition money. At one company, he stole into the office at night to run his own projects on the computers. "I wasn't really socialised," he admitted. "I didn't have anything else to do at night." Other employees complained that he shouldn't be using the facilities for his own amusement, but during one experiment - calculating the mathematical constant e to 138,000 places - he discovered that one of the company's products had a design flaw. "They should have said: 'What you're doing is really brilliant. This is really cool. Keep it up,'" he argued.

By this time, Wozniak was a friend of Steve Jobs - five years his junior but just as driven and enthusiastic for computers. "In the Sixties, there was this big countercultural movement going on - the hippies and free love and all that," Wozniak recalled. "I always admired those people for coming up with ideas that you couldn't really attack with logic. I was always going to be centred with my feet on the floor, and be an engineer with a family. Steve [Jobs] was younger and he was still the real counterculture hippy that runs around with no assets, with a lot of other people, trying to get by on nothing and get around the world with nothing, and he would eat seeds and stuff like that."

He revealed that Jobs always held ambitions to be remembered as a visionary: someone of the stature of Shakespeare or Einstein or Isaac Newton. "The way he talked, he always wanted to be one of them," Wozniak said. "And he kind of disdained all the people who just wanted to be normal." The trait would later serve Jobs well in business, where would never be prepared to sacrifice quality for margins. "He only wants the greatest in the world. That's the sort of person he is," Wozniak said. "He supplied all the drive and the marketing to have a company."

When Jobs graduated from university, he got a job at Atari, then the most exciting place to work in the nascent video-game industry. He tried to persuade his friend to join him, but by this time "the Woz" was ensconced at Hewlett-Packard (HP), which he saw as the ideal engineering firm. "I said I'd never leave. HP was started by engineers, it's full of engineers throughout the management structures," Wozniak said. "Engineers design things that have to work, they run calculations that have to have answers; it's like a form of purity, truth, the highest point of the apex of all your values. Engineers are my favourite people in the world and I'm going to be an engineer for life. I'm not going to move up into management and become subjective and political and have to put people down and take sides without real reasons. I'm going to be an engineer and make things that work - hardware and software - for the rest of my life. And I'll never leave HP because its engineers are respected. The engineers at the bottom of the organisational chart are coming up with the ideas for new products as much as marketing is funnelling them down to us."

When Wozniak eventually did leave HP, it was only because they had turned down his original designs for an Apple computer five times, and because he was given an assurance by Jobs and their new venture-capital partner, Mark Markkula, that he could remain an engineer in the truest, most "pure" sense of the word.

From that moment on, Apple would continually break new ground while sticking to a handful of fundamental principles. In design, these principles called for its products to be intuitive, natural, beautiful. "When you interact with things physically and they match the human form, they feel good and you fall in love with them," Wozniak said. "Steve Jobs once found a stone in a creek. He brought it in [to the office] and said: 'This feels good, this is what our mouse should look like.' So that was the model for the Apple mouse."

He added: "We did a lot of research that almost nobody's ever heard of, where we would bring people in who knew nothing about a computer into a blank room, watch them through two-way window mirrors and say to them: 'Figure out what this device does...' And they might discover that if you move the mouse, the cursor moves on the screen... We wanted to see what people would pick up without any manual at all." It was this mode of thinking that led to certain computer terms being given more human names, he explained. For example, in the Apple operating system, the main screen is known as the desktop.

However, he added, Jobs no longer believes in using focus groups because he thinks "they lead you off the mark and you'll have a good sense of what users want anyway."

Wozniak closed his presentation by advising the LBF audience on how to foster creativity in their own organisations. By far the most important principle to grasp is that of intrinsic rewards, he argued. "Extrinsic rewards are the ones people can see. How much do you get paid? What's your title? How many awards do you have? How many yachts? But when you do things for intrinsic rewards it's because you're satisfied. You're doing the things you like to do."

The problem with traditional education is that it encourages children to believe there is only one correct solution to problems, he continued. "But creative thinkers always think a little bit beyond what we call the right answers... To do something that's never been done, you have to find an approach that nobody has never used before, to prove yourself a little bit ahead of the rest of the world."

If you give creative people autonomy, you also give them a taste of this leadership. "Work is art for maybe one in ten engineers at Apple," Wozniak said. "It's like their work project is their soul." Once, he revealed, he redesigned a floppy disk drive just to reduce the number of holes in the circuit board from eight to five. "Nobody would ever have noticed, but it just had to be that pure for me."

Finally, he insisted, you should help creative people to pursue their own ideas on company time. "HP had a policy that you can use the parts out of the store room for something of your own design that your supervisor approved," he said. "It's so good because when you work on a personal project, you're so passionate, you learn so much, you're a better employee. A lot of companies pay for you do to college courses, but building your own projects is actually worth a lot more than [conventional] education and it's actually a lot cheaper." The ultimate conclusion? "Don't let your corporate culture get in the way."