PHOTO: Chris Mueller

YOUR WORLD increasingly runs on lithium-ion batteries. Chances are good that your phone, laptop, camera, portable music and video players, radios, and game consoles keep going only as long as there are lithium ions churning around inside them. Lithium-ion batteries are getting into your power tools. Soon they’ll even be in your car.

So it’s a shame that after nearly four decades of intensive development, lithium-ion batteries still leave plenty to be desired. They fade fast—although their energy capacity starts out higher than that of any other kind of mass-market battery, it can drop more than 25 ­percent per year in typical applications. And then there are the persistent reports of flameouts: just this January, ­journalists gathered at a Korean hospital witnessed a colleague’s laptop burst into flames. Remember the iPod that burned up in a man’s back pocket, or the Dell laptop that went up in flames at a conference in Japan? Their former owners sure do.

This is an industry ready for change but not necessarily expecting it, let alone striving for it. The big companies that domi­nate lithium-ion production—Sony, Panasonic, Sanyo, Samsung, and LG—are all selling batteries not much different from the ones they sold five years ago. Only the initial capacity of batteries has been increasing, at about 5 ­percent a year. Today they are commodity products, manufactured in huge quantities and sold at vanishingly slim profit margins.

Change, however, is about to come. And it’s going to come from a pretty surprising agent: a 40‑year-old jazz singer, soccer mom, and research chemist named Christina Lampe-Onnerud.

Since 2005, Lampe-Onnerud has quietly redesigned the ­lithium-ion battery used in today’s ­laptop computers. She started a company called Boston-Power, in Westborough, Mass., to build the novel batteries, collected nearly US $70 million in investment, set up manufacturing lines in China and Taiwan that have so far cranked out tens of thousands of units, and expects to see her batteries in products shipping from major laptop manufacturers later this year. And as if that’s not enough, she’s managed to get her batteries certified to carry the Swan label, indicating they are environmentally friendly under the Nordic ecolabel program, the first lithium-ion batteries ever to receive such a designation.