HUBS, clusters, innovation hotbeds – the PR world keeps conjuring up new buzzwords to make business parks sound sexy.

Good luck with that one.

When NETPpark opened ten years ago on the former site of the Durham County Asylum it was hailed as something different. This would be a place where innovators collaborated on new products that put the North- East at the cutting edge of science and technology.

You can hardly blame the sceptics who scoffed at the notion of a Sedgefield industrial estate as a creative hothouse – County Durham’s answer to Andy Warhol’s Factory, but with labs and quietly efficient business incubators instead of art happenings accompanied by the Velvet Underground’s art rock drone.

But NETPark has produced some world class work. In the case of Poly- Photonix it could save the taxpayer £1 billion a year by finding a treatment for blindness. It is one of the NETPark success stories that you can read about on pages 32 and 41.

There might be something to this creative cluster lark after all.

NEWCASTLE is a brilliant city, but it’s good to see other parts of our region getting their moment in the sun.

When the Tyneside-born boss of Atom bank was scouting locations to set up his national HQ, Newcastle was an obvious front runner.

Like it or not, Newcastle is the region’s de facto capital city – certainly as far as inward investors are concerned – which is why so many of them choose to set up their North- East bases in the place that begat Greggs the baker and Geordie Shore.

So, it was pleasing on Thursday to hear that Atom had chosen Durham City as the base for its banking revolution.

Atom grabbed finance headlines recently for claiming it will become the UK’s first fully-fledged digital bank when it starts trading next year.

Its intention to become the world’s first “telepathic” bank sent my PR spin detector into overdrive last week, but I wouldn’t put anything past Atom bosses Anthony Thomson and Mark Mullen who bring a refreshing punk rock attitude to the fusty old prog rock world of banking.

Ultimately, what matters are the jobs and millions of pounds of investment the firm will bring to County Durham.

Atom HQ at Aykley Heads will, in director Ed Twiddy’s words be a place for “innovative thinking all under one roof ’.” A creative hub, if you will. I suspect even Warhol might have approved.