Perspectives on Industrial Symbiosis Implementation: Informational, Managerial, and IT Aspects

摘要

Industrial symbiosis is a favored approach to balancing an industry's economic growth with its environmental impact on a regional scale. Although the scientific literature reports numerous examples of industrial symbiosis around the world, this approach and its related concepts are not considered to be widespread in practice, due to various barriers. Informational and managerial barriers are seen as significant obstacles to industrial symbiosis, but they have not yet been adequately investigated. Empirical research is needed to understand how industrial actors perceive these barriers, and especially supporting information technologies (IT). Therefore, in this paper, we first examine the barriers to industrial symbiosis through a literature review, focusing on informational and managerial barriers. In a second step, we develop a study involving an online questionnaire in order to investigate the extent of managerial and informational barriers that prevent industrial symbiosis, as well as the perception of corresponding IT support. Finally, we present the results of our pre-study.