In a blog last week on the Chronicle of Higher Education, Vivek Wadhwa, director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering, discussed the problems with cluster theory for economic development—wherein government incentives and a business park are brought together with venture capital and a nearby university to encourage the growth of clusters of entrepreneurial businesses with links to local academia to encourage innovation.

Wadhwa believes that many of these efforts have failed because they are missing out on some of the key features that necessarily must exist in order to encourage the kind of growth and development seen in a true success story, such as Silicon Valley.

             Social networking has exploded. With sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace, information is disseminated quickly and globally. While on one hand, this is a breakthrough in marketing and communications, there are hidden dangers for employers.

             Recent research from Proofpoint, a provider of email security and data loss prevention solutions, reveals that some 17 percent of US companies investigated the exposure of confidential, sensitive, or private information via a posting to a social networking site in the past 12 months; 10 percent have disciplined an employee for violating social networking policies in the past 12 months and 8 percent reported terminating an employee for such a violation. Additionally, 45 percent are highly concerned about the risk of information leakage via posts to social networking sites and two-thirds of US companies responding to the survey reported having a formal acceptable use policy for social networking.