The Dynamics of Business Ecosystems in the Context of Industrial Emergence

This paper argues that the current literature on business ecosystem theories mainly focuses on established industries from firms' perspectives, while the detailed evolutionary process of how the business ecosystem emerged from the very beginning is absent. Aiming to push the theoretical boundaries further to emerging industries using exploratory case studies on the emerging Electric Vehicle (EV) sector, this paper takes a holistic approach and put forward a conceptual framework asserting that: a Business Ecosystem has four key building blocks including Resources Pool (RP), Value Networks (VN), Interaction Mechanisms (between RP & VN), and Business Contexts (BC). This conceptual framework seeks to enrich the understanding of the evolutionary process as well as the detailed interactions between business ecosystem players along the ecosystem lifecycle.