Researcher sees big things in small lens.

• Position: Digital Optics Corp.'s founder Mike Feldman

While other entrepreneurs at The Ben Craig Center in Charlotte polished their power-lunch prowess, Digital Optics Corp. President Mike Feldman would go out back with his engineers and toss a Frisbee. Listening to the young engineers' geeky techno talk about microscopic lenses and noticing their predilection for jeans, other tenants wondered if this crew had the business sense to succeed.

They didn't need to worry. The business incubator, which has spawned about 30 companies, has spent years trying to build a research link to nearby UNC Charlotte. Now it has one. It promotes the UNCC associate professor and Digital Optics' founder as a modern start-up man.

"These guys are doing incredible things," says Jon Benson, the Craig Center's president. Exactly what things he can't say, but it has something to do with holograms and lasers and high tech.

Feldman, 34, is a bit unsettled by the attention. He's clearly more comfortable in a lab or classroom than doing interviews. All he's done, he says, is take a student's idea and expand it.

One of his grad students was thinking about taking a job writing research proposals in Research Triangle Park. "I said, 'We can do that.' So we wrote a proposal," Feldman says. They got a government research grant and went to work, coming up with a patent for digital-optic lenses.

Feldman's microscopic glass lens is thinner and more efficient than a regular...