This study introduces a social science informed technology approach to move towards a more comprehensive understanding of industry renewal. We achieve this through an evolutionary perspective scrutinising how materiality and discourse interact in an ongoing technology greening programme within the salmon farming industry in Norway. The empirical part starts with a brief introduction to the history of the salmon farming industry. This is followed by a section focusing on how new technology solutions under development relate to narratives in play in the discourses around new technology formation. The analysis reveals that a global demand narrative has become a focal point for the majority of the participating stakeholders. The narrative promotes increased growth into the ongoing greening programme under cover of feeding the world's growing population with proteins. The potential technological solutions are different forms of land‐based production systems, closed containment systems and offshore aquaculture operation systems. Undoubtedly, the systems represent huge material changes, but also a continuation of mass production rationality accountable for many of the environmental problems of the open‐net pen technology the new technologies are supposed to solve. Accordingly, the narrative appears to block a ‘cognitive renewal’ of the technology complex under study. On this basis we argue that the case underlines a requirement for more discursively informed understandings of ‘industrial renewal’ when aspiring for the introduction of green technologies.