While much work has been done on the conditions surrounding the emergence and establishment of industrial symbiosis, new attention is being paid to understanding the evolution of industrial symbiosis over time. We demonstrate empirically how a new facilitated industrial symbiosis initiative developed and evolved over an eight‐year period. We explore its network evolution by considering how the facilitator’s actions enabled and precluded two fundamental network processes – serendipitous and goal‐directed processes.
We discuss implications for a more generalized theory of industrial symbiosis development by exploring why and how different evolutionary trajectories may unfold.