"Silicon Valley has rebounded from prior downturns, but this time a shakeout in venture capital, a foreign brain drain and a crisis in California education pose new threats to the innovation ecosystem, says a report being released today."
"I'm not telling you the sky is falling, but I have a duty to report that some of the indicators are not good," said Russell Hancock, chief executive of Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network, which has indexed the region's business climate each year since 1995.
A prominent theme in this year's report is that Silicon Valley needs to acknowledge how federal investments in space and defense fertilized the region in the 1960s and 1970s, creating the environment for civilian entrepreneurship in computing and networking to flower in the 1980s and 1990s.
Now, given the vital federal role in growth sectors like biotechnology and clean technology, private sector leaders must realize that future innovation will increasingly depend on government support, said Emmett Carson, chief executive of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which helped develop the new report.
"We have started to forget how we got to be who we are," Carson said. "We got here because we went after and got huge federal investments."
The 76-page report offers a detailed look at the demographic, economic, societal and governmental characteristics of Silicon Valley, defined as all of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, with the additions of
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