Abstract
Eight-four countries have signed the "Kyoto Protocol" since 1997. After that, “Global warmming” and “Conservation issues” are closely related to our life. Because the limit of global energy supply, countries start to focus on developing the carbon trading process and clean energy alternatives, such as: solar, wind, ocean etc. Although developing the new energy became an important issue, but both of the technology and industry are not complete and also exist many restrictions. This situation lets the industry that is still in an immatured stage of development, so the new trend becomes toward to develop the “Energy Service Companies (ESCOs)”. Now, the government and academia have taken the development of ESCOs as one of important research issues. This study uses three theoretical frameworks for investigate the ecological system of ESCOs: (1) business eco-system theory. (2) innovation ecosystem and (3) business model. The integrated framework is applied to conduct an international comparative study among five countries, namely, Germany, the United States, Japan, China and Taiwan. This study shows that the strength or struggle in the ESCO industry for those countries and also use the method of focus group interview to explore each countries’ feature and the key success factors. This study finds that the bottlenecks and the main problems of the development of domestic energy service industry can be improved through six parts: (1) Promoting ESCO industrial alliance, (2) Providing multiple financing channels, (3) Reducing the ESCO contract’s risks and transaction costs (including: increased subsidies and tax cuts or earned more opportunities to coorperate with government), (4) Reviewing the long-term energy pricing policy, (5) Increase the measurement and verification (M&A) mechanisms, and (6) Adjsuting the appropriate business model in Taiwan: Energy Performance Contract. Through a newly integrated ecosystem, strengthen the relationship of the subsystems in ESCO industry, reduce the contract risk of innovation ecosystem and confirmed the right business model can reduce the suspicion or risk of both the ESCO demand side and supply side, also can expand the domestic energy service industry.The study finds out the key problems and key success fators in the developemt of Tawan’s ESCOs. Finally, some suggestions are made. Keywords: Business ecosystem, innovation ecosystem, ESCOs, business model, the integrative ecological perspective.