Drawing on current international industrial ecology thinking and experiences with Australian initiatives, this article critically overviews the current status of industrial ecology in Australia and examines the barriers and potential strategies to realise greater uptake and application of the concept. The analysis is conducted across three categories: heavy industrial areas (including Kwinana and Gladstone), mixed industrial parks (Wagga Wagga and Port Melbourne), and waste exchange networks, and identifies the past and future significance of seven different types of barriers—regulation, information, community, economic, technical, cooperation and trust, commitment to sustainable development—for each of the three categories. The outcomes from this analysis highlight that regulation, information, and economic barriers for heavy industrial area and mixed industrial parks, and economic and technical barriers for waste exchange networks are the current and future focus for industrial ecology applications in Australia. These findings appear to be consistent with recently published frameworks and learnings. The authors propose key questions that could enhance greater adoption of industrial ecology applications in Australia and acknowledge that international research and experiences, while partly providing answers to these questions, need to be adapted and refined for the Australian context.

Innovation drives economic growth. At the level of countries, the national innovation system has a strong influence on the success of innovative activities within the region. However, it is often assumed that these systems evolve through policy innovation, in a top-down manner. This paper presents an exploratory case study of the introduction of a Lean LaunchPad program in Australia. It started as a small pilot then quickly grew to become a national program. The details of this case give insight into another way that innovation systems evolve: through an evolutionary process of variation, selection and replication.