Jose Mir began his professional career in 1975 working as a research physicist at the Eastman Kodak Research Labs. His research at Kodak was quite diverse involving such areas as theoretical fluid mechanics, ceramics engineering, organometallic chemistry, photoelectrophoresis, ultrasonic cavitation/atomization, superconductivity, integrated optics, MEMS, heteroepitaxial thin film growth, second harmonic generation, electrooptics, ferroelectrics, and digital imaging systems design. He founded and led three new research laboratories that created novel technology platforms commercialized in a number of Kodak products and manufacturing processes. Jose has 67 patents and a number of scientific publications in refereed journals.
In 1993 Kodak CEO George Fisher recruited Jose for his RONA (Return On Net Assets) initiative aimed at extracting greater value from Kodak technology. In this role, he worked with Kodak’s businesses to understand and reengineer the end-to-end business process “light bulb to dollars”. There were several deficiencies identified, most notably portfolio management and the need to fill a gap defining, incubating, and taking tomarket digital products. As a result, Jose was one of two Kodak executives chartered to create an incubator for high growth digital opportunities in the areas of Health Sciences, Photography, and Government Systems. The new division became a world-wide global innovation engine with staff of over 60 professionals having diverse backgrounds including science, engineering, business, finance, marketing, human factors, product design, and business research. In his last major assignment at Kodak, Jose managed a new Kodak business serving the motion picture and television industries in the digital arena. In this capacity, Jose had full responsibility for business/technical strategies, P&L, andoperations of a product portfolio exceeding $15M annual revenue.
His business commercialized four radically new digital imaging product families, two of the products won awards for technical excellence at
NAB 2001.
Jose left Kodak in 2004 to pursue entrepreneurial interests. He served as Director, Biomedical Initiatives at the Infotonics Technology Center where he started a number of initiatives including minimally invasive glucose monitoring, allergy testing, smart prosthetics, implantable pressure sensors, and MEMS-based hyperspectral imaging. His programs have been awarded several government grants such as SBIR’s, BAA’s, and a $4.2M Congressional Award for smart prosthetics technology development.