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The aim of this paper is to better understand the good news coming from Africa and reflect on ideas discussed at the “Africa 2060: Good News from Africa” conference in April 2010 organized by Boston University's Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer‐Range Future.

Africa's performance over the last 50 years has been akin to a roller coaster ride of good news followed by bad news, with the bad news dominating. However since the dawn of the millennium Africa's outlook has increasingly become optimistic. As one looks at Africa's future, several questions emerge: which of these gains can be consolidated? Which of the positive trends will be sustained? Has this recent period of global attention provided the continent with a real institutional scaffolding on which a positive future can be built? And what needs to be done to ensure that the dangers of chronic poverty, conflict, and institutional collapse that still lurk in the shadows will be contained long enough that they eventually disappear?

The authors base their observations on the intense discussions during the conference by practitioners and experts and an engaged and informed audience, plus a broader reading of the literature, including that which was presented at the conference. These observations reflect a locus of expert and informed opinion and provide a window into the priorities that are engaging the imaginations of those thinking deep and hard about Africa's future. The authors distill seven key drivers that are of particular importance in shaping Africa's longer‐range future. Of course, all of these can operate in either a positive or a negative direction. It is the decisions that will be made by African and international policy‐makers, businesses, civic organizations, and citizens today that will determine which direction Africa will be “driven” towards tomorrow.

There are a number of exciting opportunities that await Africa in its future, but many of these also come with potential hurdles and pitfalls. Innovation, entrepreneurship, technology, knowledge, and globalization are among the areas that have generated significant good news to record from Africa. But within each of these areas there is also the potential and reality of bad news. The choice now lies with African citizens, decision makers and societies as to whether they are able to make the type of decisions that will control the negative tendencies of these drivers and accelerate the positive tendencies.

The purpose of this project was to explore and identify factors that influence a consumer to purchase wine during an afternoon of product sampling (wine tasting). A panel of consumers was recruited for an afternoon of wine tasting at vineyards in Napa, California. Several potential hedonistic, utilitarian and logistical factors (i.e. winery facilities, quality of the wine and order in which the winery was visited) were measured using a journal log that was maintained by participants following the tasting experience for a period of one‐month. The conclusions drawn from this study were that group size, confidence in one's ability to purchase wine and overall assessment of a vineyard's wine portfolio were more important than the hedonistic factors in terms of inducing a sale immediately following a taste.

This paper develops and tests a descriptive model of management accounting system choice through an empirical analysis of the adoption of innovative cost accounting systems in not-for-profit hospitals. The logistic regression analysis indicates that management accounting system design is impacted by organi zational objectives, technological complexity, and other features of the organizational control system. Descriptive statistics indicate limited use of management accounting techniques common in manufacturing firms, such as standard costing and variance analysis. A cross-lagged model suggests that implementation of an innovative management accounting system may be causally linked to decreasing operating costs.

The chapter briefly reviews the eight volumes in my Legend series – organizational buying behavior, consumer behavior, product and new product management, marketing strategy, market segmentation, global marketing, marketing research and modeling, and the future of marketing. In addition, the chapter highlights the three driving forces of much of my research: (a) the real world challenges facing corporations and organizations, (b) the search for new methodological developments, and (c) the continuous challenge of the prevailing marketing concepts and approaches. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the evolution of marketing in the past five decades and my wish list for the discipline and my future activities.

This article is premised on the idea that social networks represent an important, but often overlooked, unit of analysis in management and entrepreneurship studies. The concept of embeddedness, emphasizing the significance of social relationships, is of particular relevance as more and more frequently minorities and immigrants engage in small businessownership. This article borrows from the ethnicity and social network traditions, and offers that an analysis of the ethnic homogeneity of an entrepreneur's strong and weak social ties would be fruitful in gauging entrepreneurial success.

Given the dramatic changes in the business environment, the purpose of the paper is to stimulate readers to challenge their mental models of business and industrial marketing, and consider the implications of the blurring of the lines between industrial and consumer marketing.

The paper is a reflection on the evolution of the discipline of industrial marketing since the author's first publication in this area 40 years ago, and an analysis of the impact on this discipline of five interrelated forces of change including: the convergence of B2B and B2C driven by the advances in the internet and rise of small businesses; the prevalence of outsourcing and creation of value networks across firms and countries; the opening of corporate R&D, manufacturing and marketing to the involvement of empowered customers; bridging the functional silos within the firm; and the movement from an “industrial” to a “knowledge” based society and the blurring of products, services, and customer experience.

The lines between consumer and business marketing are increasingly blurred by new technologies and business models. Researchers and practitioners need to re‐examine their mental models of business and industrial marketing in light of these changes.

The blurring of the lines has many implications, including moving from focusing on buyers to stakeholders, recognizing new forms of relationships with empowered consumers, re‐examining the role of outsourcing, bridging disciplinary silos, recognizing the importance of brand equity, utilizing information and communications technology, focusing on the total customer experience, addressing emerging markets, re‐examining the role of marketing research and modeling, and rethinking the use of dashboards. By recognizing these changes, one can build upon the foundation of the field to develop innovative approaches to both business and consumer markets.

A call to debate the need to redefine and rethink the discipline, and even rethink the title and focus of the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing.