Find your next product in the research.
Discover emerging technologies and cross-industry ideas that could become new products, services, or technical capabilities.
Two findings, from different sources, tied into an idea neither states.
The first artifact a product leader sees. Each comes with why no single source says it, where it breaks, and the cheapest way to test it. Both below are real, from the published investigations.
Local waste-wood hard carbon to fix Europe's sodium-ion cost gap
Hard carbon has not reached its expected cost edge over graphite because feedstock is imported coconut shell and supply chains are immature.
C-027-0002C-018-0003Waste wood and treated switchgrass yield lab hard carbon with higher capacity than untreated or lower-grade versions, without strong acids.
C-021-0001C-021-0002C-017-0005C-017-0002Build regional hard-carbon plants that turn waste wood or energy grasses into anode material for European sodium-ion cell makers. The aim is to replace imported coconut-shell carbon and cut the anode cost that one model blames for sodium-ion packs costing more than LFP.
Why no single source says this. The cost study names feedstock as the bottleneck but not a fix; the materials papers show performance but no cost or supply case.
- Where it breaks
- Very high carbonization temperatures are energy-hungry, results are from half-cells or small full cells, and no cost figures exist.
- How to test it
- Make kilogram batches from local waste wood, build pouch cells against a commercial cathode, and cost the process against imported hard carbon.
Sell continuous monitors as weekly emission meters, not leak alarms
On operating sites, three vendors' monitors rarely agree at 30-minute scales, yet their time-aggregated emission distributions are similar.
C-035-0001C-035-0002A Bayesian model on fixed sensors gets noisy single windows but converges on site totals after averaging many windows.
C-001-0004C-001-0001Reposition fixed sensor networks from real-time leak alarms to time-averaged site emission meters: report weekly site totals with uncertainty, feeding measured inventories and the multi-day averages that approved US methods already use, and reserve alarms for large sustained events.
Why no single source says this. Vendors market instant alerts; neither source alone links the aggregate agreement across vendors to a statistical path to trustworthy site totals.
- Where it breaks
- If monitors report zero during many real releases on operating sites, weekly averages will be biased low, not just noisy.
- How to test it
- At a set of operating sites, compare weekly monitor totals with repeated blind-tested aerial surveys and controlled releases over several months.
Find product possibilities your existing roadmap would never surface.
Your industry already watches competitors. The harder opportunity is finding a useful capability developing somewhere else — another discipline, manufacturing process, material system, biological mechanism, or scientific field.
Between Papers systematically searches those connections, and marks the difference between an interesting analogy and a technically supported hypothesis: each idea comes with where it breaks and how to test it.
The test of a good investigation here is that you find yourself saying: I would never have thought to look there.
What to build, who buys, why now
Each opportunity is written for a roadmap conversation: the product, the buyer and the reason the timing has changed. One from each published investigation.
Cold-climate sodium-ion storage for outdoor home and site backup
- What to build
- Outdoor battery cabinets using sodium-ion cells for places where lithium iron phosphate needs heating: cold-region homes, telecom towers and remote grid sites. Sell on usable capacity in the cold and high power, not on energy density.
- Who buys
- Home storage installers and telecom or utility site operators in cold regions, buying through distributors or tenders.
- Why now
- A review reports large sodium-ion factories coming online. Two commercial cells kept most capacity at high discharge rates, and a lab electrolyte held 93.8% of capacity well below freezing in pouch cells.
Main risk. Commercial sodium-ion cells age faster when cycled in the cold, which could erase the advantage over heated LFP.
Measurement-based methane inventories as a service for gas exporters
- What to build
- A recurring service that flies aerial surveys over an operator's assets, adds modelled estimates for sources below detection, and delivers a site-level inventory with uncertainty bounds and sample-size guidance, packaged for voluntary measurement standards and possible EU import equivalence.
- Who buys
- Likely buyers: producers and LNG exporters selling into Europe, and companies seeking top-level measured reporting; assumed annual contracts.
- Why now
- UNEP reports one-third of production reports or will soon report with real-world measurements; the EU regulation introduced an import MRV equivalence framework; measured regional inventories exceeded official ones.
Main risk. A delayed or softened EU import standard removes the compliance pull, leaving only voluntary buyers.
Receiving-side mule account detection for UK payment firms
- What to build
- A mule-risk score for incoming Faster Payments accounts that combines account behaviour with network features and explains each flag, so the receiving firm can hold or freeze funds before they move on.
- Who buys
- Fraud and financial-crime leads at UK banks, EMIs and payment institutions that now pay half of every APP scam reimbursement as receiving firms.
- Why now
- Since October 2024 receiving firms fund half of reimbursements up to £85,000, a direct cost for hosting mule accounts. A bank's mule model with explanations already outperformed its rules in a live pilot.
Main risk. Fraud may pivot to international payments outside the scheme, shrinking the liability that motivates buyers.
How it works
- 01
Supply the research
Upload 25–100 papers and tell Between Papers what you're trying to understand.
- 02
Build the evidence
Technical findings, experimental conditions, limitations, agreements, and contradictions are extracted and connected across the corpus. Each claim is checked against the passage it came from.
- 03
Investigate what they enable
Findings are connected into emerging technical capabilities, including potentially useful connections from adjacent fields and, where it helps, sources from outside your corpus.
- 04
Explore commercial implications
Capabilities become potential applications and business opportunities, while evidence, assumptions, and uncertainty remain visible.
Questions
Is this just paper summarization?
No. Between Papers treats the corpus as a connected body of evidence. It looks for agreements, contradictions, dependencies, and combinations of findings that may imply something no individual paper states directly.
Does it search outside my corpus?
When useful, the investigation can use targeted external research to test assumptions, investigate adjacent fields, and assess commercial context.
Does a commercial application mean the technology will definitely work?
No. Between Papers identifies evidence-backed possibilities and explicitly surfaces what remains unproven.
Not your job? See what the research actually makes possible. · What could your research become?
Find product possibilities your roadmap would never surface.
Read a real investigation first, or start one on the field your next product will come from.
The flagship: cheaper batteries for homes and the grid, 25 seed papers, 396 sources looked at.