Industrial Symbiosis (IS) is an emerging business tool that is used by practitioners to engage cooperation among industries to reuse waste streams. The key to reveal IS opportunities for organizations is both connecting the supply and demand of various industries and providing technical knowledge on the IS implementation. This process is increasingly supported by information systems which act as a facilitator of communication and distributor of knowledge. However, we lack understanding of a describing role of each type of information system within the process of IS identification. IS literature could benefit from a clear overview of (i) the characteristics of these different information systems, (ii) the role of support these systems provide, and (iii) the technologies used to enable such identification. This paper analyzes the current state of literature that addresses information systems that facilitate IS identification and studies these systems using these three pillars. Our study contributes by providing a classification framework of information systems that facilitate industrial symbiosis identification and reveals three research directions to progress IS identification tools, namely (i) software product and service development (ii) data integration, and (iii) adoption of intelligent learning.
Industrial symbiosis (IS) is a key for implementing circular economy. Through IS, wastes produced by one company are used as inputs by other companies. The operations of IS suffers from uncertainty barriers since wastes are not produced upon demand but emerge as secondary outputs. Such an uncertainty, triggered by waste supply-demand quantity mismatch, influences IS business dynamics. Accordingly, companies have difficulty to foresee potential costs and benefits of implementing IS. The paper adopts an enterprise input-output model providing a cost-benefit analysis of IS integrated to an agent-based model to simulate how companies share the total economic benefits stemming from IS. The proposed model allows to explore the space of cooperation, defined as the operationally favourable conditions to operate IS in an economically winwin manner. This approach, as a decision-support tool, allows the user to understand whether the IS relationship is created and how should the cost-sharing policy be. The proposed model is applied to a numerical example. Findings show that cost-sharing strategies are dramatically affected by waste supply-demand mismatch and by the relationship between saved and additional costs to run IS. Apart from methodological and theoretical contributions, the paper proposes managerial and practical implications for business strategy development in IS.
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