Mark Miles

Mark Miles imagined success.

“Building a bridge between my head and the outside world is what drives me.” says the 35-year-old entrepreneur, a dreamer for whom business is a dream come true.

He earned a degree in electrical engineering in 1985 and two years ago, he and a partner founded Iridigm Display Corporation in Boston, a company that develops flat panel display technology. He is now CTO and inventor of Interferometric Modulator (IMod) technology.

“It is important to maintain your vision, to nurture your dream,” says Miles, adding his greatest reward has been watching his own dreams come alive.

“It would be fun to be famous, fun to be just plain loaded,” he says, but not just to accumulate wealth–”to take the money and bring more dreams into the world. I want to create tangible, new phenomena–new things for society.”

As a boy growing up in Atlanta, he not only was a dreamer but a builder, building telescopes, computers, and electronic parts for his electric guitar. A longtime musician in a jazz band, he has long tried to synthesize art with science and technology. “Creative things happen in the places that separate two different worlds; so I love to play around in that space.”

For all his success, he says, “I wish I was further along. As a businessman, I appreciate the clock is working against me. There’s always other technologies and ideas out there waiting to fill the gap.”

He began daydreaming at eight when he began reading science fiction. He read of cloning experiments and life on Mars. “As I’ve gotten older, my imagination has shifted to reality. The real world just gets closer to what I imagine.

“I imagine things in great detail. I see pictures. Colors,” says Miles, whose imagination now brings creative solutions to tough business problems. “The miracle, he says, “is the answers always come.”

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On Topic: alumni/ae, business, entrepreneurship