There is always a heated debate on the interest for an organization to introduce non-compete clauses in its employment contracts. I truly believe that those clauses are counter-productive.
As an aside to an interesting post explaining why Facebook’s business model is flawed and won’t change ‘“Do no harm” to Facebook’s business model’, Frederic Filloux quotes “A Stanford professor told me once that the absence of a non-compete clause in California’s labor laws has been a key factor to the rise of Silicon Valley against the startup ecosystem of the East Coast.” And indeed, it appears that California does not allow those clauses, whereas in the rest of the US and of the world they tend to be widespread (in France their impact is limited by the fact that the employer must compensate for the application of the clause, which makes it onerous).
I believe those clauses are stupid, in part because they stop innovation, they are difficult to apply in reality, and they create all sort of resentment between the employee and the employer. They should be limited to issues of commercial nature. In the collaborative Age, any impediment to the creation of teams to innovate and solve complex projects should be removed for the system to be effective.
