Environmental threats and its effects on the innovation landscape in thailand: toward a quintuple helix?

Abstract

Several “helices multiple models” have been proposed for analyzing and to a certain extent for predicting innovation pattern in the twenty-first century. While the basic triple helix stresses the university-industry-government relation, the quadruple model embeds a technological-savvy civil society in this equation. However, other important factors have emerged to be especially sensitive in affecting—positively and adversely—societal conditions for innovation, and environment is certainly a key one. Both doctrine (Carayannis et al. 2012) and institutions have been discussing, directly or indirectly, about a quintuple helix, including ecology in its wider meaning. In the specific geographic and institutional framework of Southeast Asia, environmental conditions, and the unique challenges they present, constitute essential components to analyze and predict innovation forces. It is important to remember that environmental security has emerged as one of the most relevant non-traditional security issues in the region, and that migration, climate changes, and environmental hazards have always affected countries of this area in a measure even more significant than in other parts of the planet. It is not accidental that one of the first and most renowned centers of non-traditional security is hosted in Singapore—that is, RSIS Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies—as a leading research center in the field for the last 15 years.