[samatman]

Batteries are one I happen to know something about, a startup I worked for hosted $major-university's monthly battery lecture series, we were doing a SaaS business targeted at the vertical. I met a dozen or so grad students doing exactly this.

So, nope, bad example. Taking an existing process and giving it a few tweaks will push it around in parameter space, improving something we care about (number of cycles before 80%, let's say), often at the expense of something else, like you can't apply as many coulombs. Congratulations, you've got a thesis. And there are dozens of basic battery processes.