Has any field done a good job of balancing the tension of letting employee's be able to freely move and the employer's ability to protect IP from moving to a competitor?
I only really know the finance and software fields well and there its very acceptable for an employee to leave for a competitor, however the line starts to get very murky when the employee starts recruiting other employee's to their new employer.
Typically there is a garden leave involved where the employee gets paid but can't compete with his/her former employer and can't recruit from them for the same period. Other than that, quant's often walk out the door with their models, while programmers can't leave with their source code, open source aside.
How does, say the drug industry, handle top scientist switching companies, or does this not happen as often due to the large time required to produce drugs?