Networking with Lynnette Claire

                Lynnette Claire went to the University of Oregon where she received her PhD and works at the University of Puget Sound.  Lynette started her career with a Gardening Magazine in Boston.  When this fell through she started a job in Seattle called Seafood trade.  At this time she felt she was not much more than a glorified secretary.  She then had an opportunity to start a magazine called Simply Seafood.  After starting this business, which is still running she accidently fell into starting a business of tree care with an arborist.  She then moved on to event planning with “Freelance” where she helped start the 6^th avenue public market. 

                Lynette started Entrepreneurial Network and believes that she needs to keep college graduates in the local area of Tacoma.  She believes she can achieve this act by developing a strong local network.  Building a local network will help raise the awareness of the politicians.  This will also give entrepreneurs more access to resources, will help companies grow faster, allow knowledge to be more available and help develop more innovative products.  She pointed out that there are 2 types of networks which are cohesive ties and structural holes.  Cohesive ties have the strengths that everyone knows everyone, the quality of information is good and there is a self-correcting mechanism.  Structural holes allows for more branching out to different pools of people which in turn allows for a lot of new types of knowledge to be brought into the network.  She believes that people should decide what kind of network they typically reside in and make attempts to branch out into the opposite to allow for greater networking abilities.