HBR Article: Cities with Highly Connected Citizens on LinkedIn Fare better in Job Growth

Today I came along an interesting article in the current issue of Harvard Business Review.
It's main thesis states that there is a correlation of connectedness on LinkedIn an job growth.
Which means that cities with highly connected citizens fare significantly better in number of added jobs compared to cities with less enthusiastic social networkers.

The reported significance is more than double the job growth in cities with higher connectedness than their less connected counterparts.

The author even states connectedness as a means to further job growth for less successful cities or regions in regard to creating new jobs.

At first sight I was somewhat surprised upon the findings and was almost lead into thinking that this is some significant finding.
But reflecting on the deeper implications I came to the conclusion that this is exactly the main reason for industrial clusters and startup concentration hubs---or isn't it?
Of course the statistics presented do not imply any causality (which the author correctly states in the article).
Nevertheless, there might be some almost causal interdependence of highly connected people and the number of newly created jobs. Knowing the right people is one of the most important factors when creating or growing a business.

So it might be a no-brainer to conclude that high connectedness metrics on LinkedIn represents a region or city with a lot of people that indeed know the right people to foster business.

And it is not a new idea: as stated above this is the main idea of industrial clusters and startup concentrator initiatives, namely, bringing together people with diverse and innovative ideas and the resources to bring them alive...