Summary Industrial symbiosis (IS), one of the founding notions within the field of industrial ecology, has diffused throughout significant parts of the world as a practice that can reduce the ecological impact of the industrial processes of groups of firms. In this article, we propose a fresh look at this research topic, building on the considerable advances that have been made in the last 15 years in understanding how IS come...

Summary It has been long recognized in the conceptual literature that industrial symbiosis requires a perspective that focuses on long‐term evolution. This has not yet been matched by adopting an adequate process‐oriented research methodology. This article provides the underpinnings for such a methodology, presents a developed methodology, event sequence analysis, and shows its added value through a set of research questions a...

Summary One assumption underlying the work on industrial symbiosis (IS) is that certain social conditions must be fulfilled in order for firms to develop symbiotic linkages. In this article we add depth to this insight by using institutional capacity as an underlying concept for these conditions, and we propose that such capacity influences IS by altering the opportunity set of actors. We then test the assumption on a dataset...