It's Baton Rouge: Out To Lunch

Thirty years ago, a young, high energy entrepreneur left his private sector job to create the Louisiana Business and Technology Center on the LSU campus, a business incubator for small startups. In the three decades since, the LBTC has helped launch hundreds of businesses and has spawned the creation of the much larger LSU Innovation Park, a 13 year old facility on its own south campus dedicated to research commercialization. This edition of Out to Lunch Baton Rouge is a special tribute to that man, Charlie D Agostino, who is retiring at the end of the 2018. Few people in Louisiana know more about business incubation and economic development than Charlie, who himself is a 1972 LSU graduate with degrees in chemistry in business. He started his career with NASA. In 1988, LSU recruited him to develop the LBTC, which today is the flagship entity on the 200 acre Innovation Park, which is about five miles downriver from the main LSU campus and today includes not only the LBTC but also the LSU Student Incubator, LSU