IV. Answer the following questions about the text

1. What do company leaders talk about and why?

2. What may companies do in order to not stifle new ideas?

3. What problems do innovators face when they go to large companies with new ideas for their products?

4. Is a single breakthrough enough? Why?

5. Why are newcomers rare in industries like cars, software and pharmaceuticals?

V. Match the words to their definitions

1. intrapreneur 2. skunk works 3. innovation 4. breakthrough 5. beta version 6. trial 7. capacity

an important discovery or event that helps to improve a situation or provide an answer to a problem. version of software that has been tested by the people who developed it and then given to a specially chosen group of users to find out if there are any more small problems with it, before it is made available to the public. a place where a large company gives a small group of workers the job of trying to develop new products within a shorter period of time than usual the amount of something that a factory, company, etc. can produce. someone who works for an organization, but outside the usual management structure, and who develops new products and activities. a process of testing a product to see whether it is safe, effective, etc. the introduction of new ideas or methods.

VI. Read the article and define the main idea

In the bag

Michael Skapinker

If you want to be a hero, an engineer once told Steve Gleich, then solve the banana bag problem in Costa Rica. What, asked Mr Gleich, a researcher at DuPont, the US science group, was the banana bag problem?

The engineer pulled a bag from his drawer. Costa Rica used millions of them to cover bunches of bananas, he said. The bags were used as miniature hothouses to ripen the bananas while protecting them during transport. Imagine the work involved in removing them from every bunch and the financial and environmental cost of disposing of them.

Mr Gleich had the answer: Biomax, a material that naturally decomposes. The DuPont researchers who developed Biomax had first thought of using it for disposable nappies*. Nothing had come of that. Why not banana bags that would disintegrate as the fruit ripened?

Del Monte's Costa Rican banana operation was interested - but then the country manager had an unrelated disagreement with his head office and refused to take any more bags. More than a decade after DuPont first came up with Biomax, it has yet to find a use for it.

From the Financial Times

*Nappies are worn by babies. AmE: diapers

VII. Say ‘true’ or ‘false’. If ‘false’, correct the sentence. Rely on the information from the text

1. The article is about finding a use for Biomax, a material developed by DuPont.

2. Biomax remains in the same state for many years.

3. It had been planned to use Biomax to make nappies, but this did not happen.

4. Biomax was used to make special bags for bananas.

5. The bags were not a success for technical reasons.

6. DuPont has found many other uses for Biomax.