Promoting industrial symbiosis: empirical observations of low-carbon innovations in the Humber region, UK

• Aimed to increase understanding how waste-to-resource innovations can be promoted.
• Analysed social process of development of relations between resource suppliers and clients.
• Companies had to diversify resource partners when exploring new business activities.
• Companies expanding core business preferred to initially strengthen existing relations.
• Provided operational and strategic insights to promote waste-to-resource innovations.

Industrial symbiosis has been identified as a strategy to increase resource efficiency, lower carbon emissions and increase business growth. One type of industrial symbiosis is the innovative use of wastes from one company as a resource for another company. However, empirical understanding of implementing waste-to-resource innovations, and hence how they can be promoted by public and private organisations, is still limited. Therefore this study explored how companies implemented waste-to-resource innovations in the Humber region, UK. Five case studies were conducted with companies that used or supplied a secondary biomass resource for power generation or fuel manufacturing. This article discusses how companies developed relations with biowaste resource suppliers or clients. The results expanded operational understanding of waste-to-resource innovation processes as it revealed companies' activities and their strategic considerations. Comparing the case studies, the social processes through which relations between biowaste resource partners developed were largely similar. However, two different networking strategies were identified. Some companies had to engage new industries and therefore diversified their resource partners during the innovation process, but strived to limit the number of resource partners once the innovation was realised. Conversely, others expanded activities within their network and hence strengthened existing relations during the innovation, but strived to increase the number of resource partners afterwards to manage risky over-dependencies within their supply network. Finally, resource security, economic benefits and policy and regulation were of key importance. To conclude, operational and strategic insights to promote the uptake of waste-to-resource innovations are presented, however, further research is necessary before broad generalizations can be considered.