Lynette Claire - guest speaker

Lynette Claire was our guest speaker at UW Tacoma. She is a professor at UPS. She talked about creation of an Entrepreneurial Network, social network for beginning and experienced entrepreneurs. She is very determined to create the network and believes that it will be useful and succeed. She described two types of networks: cohesive and structural holes. In cohesive network, everybody knows everybody else. The information in such a network is more accurate because it can be quickly verified, as everybody knows everybody else. Also, it takes time to enter such a network because you need to know everyone. Such networks cannot grow too large due to its nature of knowing everyone. Another network type is structural holes, where new information is the prime benefit. You know one person, who knows someone else, who knows some information. So, it becomes available to you through that someone who knows someone else, who… etc. Both network types are present in my life with different groups, and like Lynette Claire said, there is benefit in both.

She also talked about the event that she was jury in, some kind of entrepreneur competition, where groups of students from different universities generated business ideas and wrote a short business plan in very short period of time. I think, the problem they had to solve was about waste. Good exercise, in my opinion, but I believe that the best comes from hard work, not from thirty minutes of brainstorming. So, the whole value of the event was to practice the process – from idea to business plan. Honestly speaking, I didn’t get much from this lecture. Sorry, Claire.