Even as economic losses and unemployment levels mount, America’s most effective engine for wealth and job creation is being dangerously–perhaps fatally–compromised.

For more than 30 years the entrepreneurship-venture capital-IPO cycle centered in Silicon Valley has generated new wealth, commercialized innovation, and created new companies and industries. It’s also spun off millions of new jobs. The great companies created by this process–Intel (INTC), Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), eBay (EBAY), Microsoft (MSFT), Cisco (CSCO), to name just a few–have propelled most of the growth in the U.S. economy in the last two decades. And what began as a process almost exclusively available to scientists and engineering Ph.D.s became open to just about anyone with a good business plan and a healthy dose of entrepreneurial drive.

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