Big in Japan? How a band from Liverpool made me think about the next Elon Musk.
By: Richard Bradshaw
Tags: Startup, Battery, Energy Storage

Big in Japan? How a band from Liverpool made me think about the next Elon Musk. Richard Bradshaw Jun 3, 2020·3 min read

Have you heard the one about the UK inventing rechargeable lithium-ion batteries in the 70s? Sony realizes they could be used to power the consumer devices of the 80s, now lithium-ion batteries are everywhere, and the UK gets little more than a Nobel Prize.

You’ve heard it before and I’ve got it wrong?

Yes, I know. It was John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino who were awarded the Nobel Prize (not the UK, but one is a Brit and research was advanced in the UK). And Exxon (American, but with British roots) had a lot to do with the original research. On top of that, the UK’s atomic industry had a nice nuclear-inspired poke around.

Lots of players from France (ANVAR the French innovation agency played pivotal roles) to Japan (Matsushita and Sanyo were innovators in addition to Sony’s substantial effort) and beyond contributed. Some developments built on the foundations of others. There were even many similar innovations happening across the globe by rival teams unaware of each other.

It was clearly a global distributed effort, which UK citizens and UK institutions contributed to alongside many others. There’s a lot to the story — an article here and a Wikipedia here give a decent brief history.

And the story continues with China currently dominating production ( Forbes), countries considering their place in the battery manufacturing supply chain ( Bloomberg NEF), and “new” companies like Tesla coining terms like gigafactory (that is already becoming a generic term for large battery plant, see the Google trend here).

Meanwhile, countless innovators are evolving lithium-ion and advancing alternative energy storage technologies.

This history interests me. The future interests me even more.

Where is the UK currently innovating? Where did this technology come from? Who is taking up the commercialisation of the technology? Who comes, who goes? That sort of thing.

So I’ve taken to documenting what I can see in the current UK innovation scene. The first output from the work an animated timeline of the UK’s energy storage technology industry is shown below & hosted on Flourish here:

See the animated timeline here: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/2275334/

I plan to work with others to keep this map up-to-date, add to the history, and write some articles about related matters.

For example, I am interested in writing a piece about the role of invention versus the role of commercialisation, and whether it’s OK to be the inventor. It may not remain UK and/or energy storage focused (that’s just a starting point).

So this is me starting.

And why is this post titled Big in Japan? And how is this connected to the next Elon Musk? Is that a reference to Sony’s commercialisation of lithium-ion. Sort of.

Being from Liverpool, I’m aware of a band formed in that city called Big in Japan. Active in the late 1970s, the band came to nothing much. However, the band members went onto inspire or create (and in the case of The KLF destroy) so many aspects of the music you will hear today.

It feels like every scene has this evolutionary process with some small players having an unexpected outsized influence on what follows. And the current map has omissions.

It feels like a good starting question. Who is missing from the map? Are they like Big in Japan?

Published By

Richard Bradshaw

Working out if the things I’ve been in the past (engineer, entrepreneur, etc) are what I’ll be in the future. Interested in the history of things (was rubbish at history in school).

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.