How Companies With Industrial Symbiosis Business Models Can Contribute to the Mainstreaming of Industrial Symbiosis

ABSTRACT Companies incorporating industrial symbiosis in their business models (ISBMs) play important roles in the realization of IS solutions. This paper explores how this group can also influence contextual conditions for the wider adoption of these solutions, thus contributing to their mainstreaming. Through a multiple case study of development processes connected to a diverse set of ISBM companies, three types of mechanisms were abductively synthesized: business model innovation, contribution to emergent societal change, and institutional entrepreneuring. These suggest that ISBM companies as a group, under the right conditions, play an important role in mainstreaming IS within companies, across industrial systems, and at the societal level. Our study found evidence of early steps in these directions. The paper contributes to the limited empirical foundation on companies with an ISBM and proposes new mainstreaming mechanisms for IS linked to the emergence of actors with IS as a core concern rather than a side activity.