How Open Innovation Models Might Help the Thai Energy Sector to Address the Climate Change Challenge? - A Conceptual Framework on an Approach to Measure the Impact of Adoption of Open Innovation

Climate change has increasingly impacted businesses both on their growths and a risk of sustainability. The energy sector has been the main contributor of carbon emissions to the atmosphere, accounting for 66.5 percent of total world emissions (Herzog, 2009). As a consequence, the energy sector will be a focus of international scrutiny and strategy of emission reduction. With the recent controversial concerns in global warming issue, various mitigation and adaptation technologies, measures, and strategies, have been undergoing proposed and implemented since the early 2000s. Such activities require a usage of both internal and external knowledge in developing those innovations to be launched consistently and successfully. Several researchers have identified that relying on closed innovation system to create innovation is insufficient and no longer sustainable for a knowledge intensive sector in particular. The open innovation model, proposed by Henry Chesbrough in 2003, has been frequently applied to offer a more effective approach in generating innovation by using internal and external knowledge. There is, however, a lack of indepth research carrying on the issue of how one could efficiently implement open innovation to address the certain challenge, especially in energy sector which are now encountering the challenge of climate change. The purpose of this research is to develop an open innovation model that can assist in adopting open innovation process in Thai energy sector with a view to combating with climate change concern. The study also aim to assess the impact of the integration of open innovation approaches within Thai energy sector through its appreciation level of the related stakeholder with a view to suggest policy implications for energy sector in contesting with a controversial climate change concern in the future. While this research focuses on energy sector in Thailand, its findings should be relevant for other countries that are in the process of combating with climate change concern.