This paper builds on current service and marketing literature on the emerging ecosystem perspective and the key role of customers to conceptualize actor alignment. Setting the ecosystem nexus as the primary beneficiary, the customer, the study situates the customer’s value-creating network of relations within the broader, often-indirect influence of actors at multiple ecosystem levels. Ecosystem actor alignment is then conceptualized as a multi-dimensional framework based on an integrative review of customer ecosystems and ecosystem alignment. The framework elucidates the dimensionality as well as the potential mechanisms and facilitators of intra/inter-actor alignment, enabling a detailed multi-dimensional assessment of alignment-misalignment in ecosystems. The paper is a step to providing structure and granularity to diverse concepts and perspectives related to the ubiquitous term of alignment. It helps researchers and practitioners to clarify and apply the concept to actor dynamics enabling diagnostics of customer and ecosystem alignment/misalignments, crucial for adaptability and change.

Keywords:
ecosystem alignment, ecosystem actors, service-dominant logic, customer-dominant logic, customer value creation