The university is a place of learning, where scholars do research and impart their wisdom to students through lectures and courses. But with all those smart people walking around, sometimes great ideas emerge from the ivory towers of academia that are quite unrelated to one’s field of study or area of expertise. And, like all happy accidents, sometimes those are the best ideas.
Take, for example, the current experience of Professor
Manos Chatzopoulos, you don’t have to be an astrophycisist to find a parking space in Baton Rouge but it helps
Manos is Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at LSU. Like a lot of folks on the LSU campus, Professor Chatzopoulos got fed up trying to find a parking space. Where you and I might curse in frustration or even pray for a parking spot before we’re late for our appointment, we’re not astrophysicists who specialize in supercomputer simulations of supernovae and massive stellar evolution. Manos is. So what did he do? He came up with a parking app.
Park Zen uses smart crowdsourcing to track and connect users with available parking in their vicinity— right down to the spot. It’s like a Waze for parking.
Manos is working on marketing Park Zen to organizations with heavy traffic and parking needs, like college campuses and shopping malls.
Manos is not only making life easier for his colleagues and students on the car-crowded LSU campus, he’s also getting noticed in the entrepreneurial community. The Park Zen app took first place in the 2022 Baton Rouge Entrepreneur Week Pitch competition, which earned Manos $100,000.
David Price is the creator of another driving-related invention: The Safety Pouch. The Safety Pouch is a high-visibility wallet that a driver can use to present their identification to police officers during traffic stops.
David Price is saving lives acrtoss the country with his college project turned entrepreneurial success story
The brilliance of the bright orange pouch is that it’s easy for a driver in a traffic stop to grab off the sun visor, snap it on the open car window and keep their hands in plain sight.
David Price’s Safety Pouch
David brought the pouches to market during the ascendancy of the Black Lives Matter movement. The Safety Pouch is aimed at demonstrating cooperation and cutting down on dangerous, sometimes deadly, misunderstandings.
Entrepreneurially, it was the right idea at the right time and it took off. In the fall of 2021, David successfully pitched Walmart on his product, which ordered 15,000 pouches and now sell it in 400 stores – while David was still a college student at Loyola!
Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. Photos by Erik Otts.
