Who owns your knowledge?
Ken is a process engineer for Stardust Chemical Corp., and he has signed a secrecy agreement with the firm that prohibits his divulging information that the company considers proprietary.
Stardust has developed an adaptation of a standard piece of equipment that makes it highly efficient for cooling a viscous plastics slurry. (Stardust decides not to patent the idea but to keep it as a trade secret.)
Eventually, Ken leaves Stardust and goes to work for a candy-processing company that is not in any way in competition. He soon realises that a modification similar to Stardust's trade secret could be applied to a different machine used for cooling fudge and, at once, has the change made.
Has Ken acted unethically?
Mike W. Martin & Roland Schinzinger, Introduction to Engineering Ethics, 2nd edition, McGraw-Hill, Noew York, 2010, p. 156
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