Being at the front line of innovation in battery technologies can be challenging. It requires Saft experts to keep track of the latest developments while simultaneously exploring new technologies ‘in-house’ – with the aim of providing our customers with the best possible range of battery solutions for their needs.
We spoke with Kamen Nechev, Chief Technology Officer for Saft, to find out how he helps create the right environment for innovation, how things have changed over his 25 years with the company, and much more.

If you look at the wider battery market in 1999, lead-acid and nickel-based batteries were dominant and lithium-ion cells were not nearly as common. Li-ion appeared on the battery scene in 1991 and although it made inroads in portable electronics many early laptops still used nickel metal hydride batteries. Most Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV) used nickel metal hydride batteries, and lithium-ion battery technology being used in turn-of-the-century electric vehicles was not widely recognized as being that important.
Of course, that’s changed now.
For vehicles it started with hybrids, then the success of fully electric models like the Tesla Roadster. That growing electric vehicle market, boosted by a recognition of the role batteries and battery-powered vehicles can play in reducing our global carbon footprint, significantly pushed battery technology forward.
And after the turn of the century, lithium-ion technology became the only choice for portable electronics – notably mobile phones and laptops. The explosion in those markets really helped to drive the significant advancements we’ve seen in lithium-ion batteries and has changed the way people talk about batteries in general.
When I started at Saft I would tell people what I did at dinner parties and the like and I’d often be met with quite a bored, non-fussed face. Now batteries are ‘sexy’, people are interested in what’s going on and recognize the essential role they play.

It’s all about finding the right balance between push and pull approaches. There are always going to be market-driven reasons for developing technology and our marketing teams help identify the trends and changing needs of different sectors. That helps guide us to meet these expectations.
That’s an important part of what we do, but we also have the ‘push’ side where technical insights and innovative ideas can drive groundbreaking change and create new markets.
The pull factors help drive evolution, but the push factors and more explorative side is where technological revolution occurs. Think about Steve Jobs and what happened with the iPhone. He had this idea that this phone would be not only for calls, but also be how people would navigate using maps, get online, check the weather forecast, and more. The market at the time did not foresee that need, but innovative thinking forged an entirely new market for smartphones.
For us it’s crucial to maintain that balance between both approaches, so we allocate resources to both customer-driven projects and innovative and often high-risk endeavours.

Absolutely, failure is a necessary component of innovation. We’ll always commit a portion of our resources to experimental high-risk projects and by their nature, many will ‘fail’.
We have the structures in place to support innovation, through incubators and low TRL (Technology Readiness Level) organizations that operate outside of the main Saft business.
Some of that environment-setting is cultural and we encourage experimentation and accept that failure is a by-product of pushing boundaries. You tend to learn a huge amount from those ventures.
There’s also, of course, our people. As part of my role as CTO I look to not only attract new talent, but also retain our long-tenured experts and their immense breadth and depth of knowledge. That knowledge base is, crucially, spread across our plants to encourage innovation across the business.

The idea of IoT has been around for some time now, but it’s evolved from being used in fairly limited industrial applications to permeating almost every aspect of life and business. It’s something that’s so familiar to people now, to the point where multiple devices are now present in most modern homes.
We’re more focused on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) side of things where the range of applications is really quite astounding – you have farmers using them to optimize dairy production through monitoring their cows, and people tracking cargo all over the world using IIoT devices.
Saft’s strength in this area really started with our expertise in the metering market and providing batteries for water, gas, and electricity meters. Our batteries for metering work for utility providers who really value OPEX and lifespan. Getting utilities to regularly, and manually, check the status of meters is an extremely inefficient way of doing things, so having reliable long-life batteries is an essential part of their business.
Working closely with our clients helps us to understand the market-specific performance requirements and battery designs required, and guides us towards the technological steps we need to take to continue providing quality and reliability in all environments.

I think in the wider battery industry there’ll be a real push for advancements that can reduce costs and increase lifespan – with a specific focus on making electric vehicle and energy storage technologies more accessible and efficient.
You might also see the emergence of some new battery technologies, such as sodium-ion batteries which could present an interesting alternative for applications currently using lithium-ion cells.
With our IIoT focus I think we’ll see even greater demand for batteries with higher power and improved performance, particularly in extreme or difficult environments. We’ll have to find ways to balance that performance with a long lifespan, and safety – which is always an important consideration – will become even more important for customers who are already expecting more and more safety features on their devices.
