Yoshino Akira fixes the basic structure of the lithium-ion battery, and the patents that follow (1985)

The value of keeping hold of a technology’s origin

The core of this decision lies not in a business strategy settled at a management meeting but in a technical choice made by a single researcher inside the basic-research themes he was reassigned every two years. Choosing a carbon material for the anode was not, at the time, understood as a managerial move that would decide whether the battery could be mass-produced or commercialised at all. Yet it is precisely this technical judgment that became the asset which survived the rises and falls of Asahi Kasei’s battery business over the following three decades and more.

The implication of the case is that, having taken the setback of a dissolved joint venture on the mass-production side, the company nonetheless kept hold of an intangible asset — the basic patents — and that this bore fruit in the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Even when outrun by competitors in the speed of commercialisation, holding on to the origin of a technology has a value of its own. With the development race over all-solid-state batteries entering a new phase, Yoshino’s own question — how to position sustained investment in basic research — still carries weight, and not for Asahi Kasei alone.