‘I have one word to say to you,” an elderly bore in the 1967 film The Graduate said to star Dustin Hoffman: “Plastics.”

These days that one word might be “batteries.”

Already the consumer market for lithium batteries is worth about £7bn a year, and that figure is expected to double in ten years — without counting the possible electric vehicle market, and the possibilities inherent in storing electricity gained from such sustainable sources as wave and wind.

You probably use batteries in your computer, your camera, your telephone, your car, your smoke alarm, not to mention, possibly, your hearing aid, but picture yourself in 20 years’ time.

You might be driving around in an electric car with a 400-mile range, and heating your home with electricity produced on top of your roof and then captured and stored in a battery.

Little wonder, then, that leading investors including Imperial Innovations and Invesco Perpetual, based in Henley, have piled in to back a young British leader in the race to produce the battery of the future: Nexeon.

Meeting chief executive Dr Scott Brown, at Nexeon’s cool, modern headquarters at Milton Park, workplace for 35 people, offers an insight into how technologies that will change our way of life evolve.

He said: “We are concentrating on three areas: licensing our unique technology to others; making and selling silicon anode material; and becoming a niche battery maker ourselves.”

Nexeon offers potential customers, for example in the auto industry, a lithium (Li-ion) battery which uses silicon in place of carbon as an anode (negative electrode) — and in which the silicon is presented in a way which is cheap to produce and long-lasting.

Silicon has long been known to be about about ten times more efficient as an anode in rechargeable batteries than traditional carbon, but its strength has always been its weakness because, as silicon sucks in lithium, it expands and then shrinks again when the battery is charged — and constant expansion and contraction makes its efficiency decrease and the battery liable to break.

Nexeon’s unique and patented selling point is that, etched on the surface of the anode is a spiky, hedgehog-like structure which overcomes this problem.

And that could one day, sooner than you might think, lead to a BlackBerry that needs charging only once a week, or an electric car with a 500-mile range.

Dr Brown said: “With electric vehicles weight is all important. And only three grammes of silicon is needed for an equivalent battery that would need ten grammes of carbon. This weight difference could be used to dramatically increase the range of electric vehicles.”

Nexeon is a spin-out company of Imperial College, London, and its product is based on research carried out there by Professor Mino Green and his colleagues in the Department of Electrical Engineering.

Acting initiallly with seed capital of about £200,000 put up by technology transfer company Imperial Innovations, and the firm’s current chairman Dr Paul Atherton, Nexeon moved to Culham in 2007. Then the company went on to raise about £15m more from investors.

Dr Brown said: “We moved to Culham because UKAEA had facilities there, having previously been involved in battery research. And there were also battery experts there for us to employ.”

In July, the company moved to Milton Park. Until recently it has been spending its investment money on research and development but now it has revenue from customers, mainly in Asia, buying the patented material for further testing.

Dr Brown said: “Next year we plan to expand again. We shall set up a plant to make and sell silicon anode material, though we have not yet decided where that plant will be.

“We would very much like it to be in the UK, but it may have to be closer to either supplies of silicon or to major customers who, at the moment, are predominantly in Asia — although there is growing interest from Europe and North America, too.”

Silicon material is made from sand and quartz and in Britain much of it comes from Wales. But why go into manufacturing — why not stick to licensing your product to others?

Dr Brown said: “Sometimes you need to do a bit yourself. Give the market a bit of a jolt.”

The third line of business the company is pursuing, namely niche markets — hearing aid batteries, for example —rather than the mainstream, might also spell a lucrative manufacturing future.

But Dr Brown agreed that developing technologies of the future, even when you have top experts, a new invention and, crucially, you saw the bandwagon before most of your competitors — is still like running a race.

Will the big boys, at present mainly in Japan, back you?

Yet even in the current jittery economic climate, Dr Brown is upbeat about the uptake of the technology now being developed at Milton Park.

He said: “Battery technology is such a hot space that we are probably less affected than most.”

He would not expand on the possible size of the new manufacturing venture next year.

But anyone visiting the clean, high-tech premises could hardly fail to leave without feeling some sort of modern alchemy was at work here.

Indeed, watching one machine at work, I even saw what looked like copper going in at one end and coming out the other looking like silver!

And is the UK Government backing innovative cutting-edge technology as much as other nations’ governments?

“Of course not,” said Dr Brown.

But then again, if I had asked the same question abroad of a foreign competitor, I probably would have got the same answer.

Name: Nexeon Established: 2007 Chief executive: Dr Scott Brown Number of staff: 35 Annual turnover: Confidential Contact: 01235 436320 Web: www.nexeon.co.uk