Business ecosystem and stakeholders’ role transformation: Evidence from Chinese emerging electric vehicle industry

•The roadmapping method is applied to analyse the evolution of Chinese EV industry.•A ‘Triple Oscillation’ Model presents the emerging industry’s ecosystem evolution.•The business ecosystem lifecycle is expanded with one more initiating stage.•A conceptual agent-based model is proposed for business ecosystem evolution. Nurturing an emerging industry’s business ecosystem always requires stakeholders’ efforts and role transformation. By systematically reviewing and studying the evolution of the Chinese electric vehicle industry, this paper constructs a three-dimensional theoretical framework including stages of business ecosystem lifecycle, stakeholder classification and functional roles, to analyse the transformation both of different stakeholders and their functional roles. The findings show that business ecosystem stakeholders have experienced role transformation following a mechanism defined as the ‘Triple Oscillation’ Model during the evolution of the emerging industry. These findings also help develop a conceptual model of agent-based system for business ecosystem evolution, which could be a starting point for further emerging industry study.