Exploring the potential of online sales configurators as tools to assist industrial symbiosis network

Industrial symbiosis (IS) refers to a subfield of industrial ecology in which industries belonging to the same or different sectors adopt a collective approach to gain competitive advantage by exchanging materials, resources, and by-products. As a result, traditionally separate industries can engender an industrial symbiotic network (ISN), comprising at least three companies exchanging at least two types of waste, to gain economic advantage from interfirm exchange. To assist ISNs, specific online platforms have been designed as IS platforms. This paper addresses open questions in previous research on interfirm exchange between industries through an online IS platform. The aim is to assess whether and to what extent the implementation of a co-design tool, known in the literature as an online sales configurator (OSC), can assist processes of waste management to facilitate intra- and inter-firms in dynamics of industrial symbiosis. At the empirical level, this study considers two cases of Italian companies adopting IS and 15 IS platforms from different European countries. The empirical investigation detects the extent to which the implementation of an OSC can assist companies in their intra-firm and interfirm transactions on IS platforms. On the managerial implications of this study, it proposes the implementation of an OSC as a tool to support companies in value creation and acquisition in approaching IS. At IS networking level the study proposes the implementation of an OSC as a tool to overcome IS barriers with attention to knowledge sharing and companies’ engagement within IS platforms.