WELLESLEY, Mass., March 11, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- U.S.News & World Report has ranked Babson's MBA Program No. 1 in Entrepreneurship for the 21st consecutive year.

Babson is tied for #1 with Stanford University. Others schools ranked in the top five for Entrepreneurship in the Best Graduate Schools 2015 report include MIT #3, Harvard #4, and University of California – Berkeley #5.

"This continued success reflects the commitment of the Babson community to educate and prepare entrepreneurial leaders who create economic and social value everywhere," said Babson College President Kerry Healey.

President Obama’s fiscal 2015 budget proposal would invest in programs that demonstrate effectiveness and in generating new knowledge about what works through more evidence and evaluation.

While the headlines about the president’s new budget focus on the big numbers, there is a significant back story about the expanded use of “evidence and rigorous evaluation to improve policy outcomes.”

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When it comes to a good elevator pitch, brevity and memorability are everything. Most elevator pitches are neither.

One of us (Liza) is a staff cartoonist for the New Yorker, while the other (Deb) is a mentor to many start-up founders.  We got to talking about the problem of crafting a brief, memorable pitch, and the impact of powerful visuals — and began discussing how any new venture or project could benefit from a pithy cartoon that sums up its value proposition. After all, most people are visual learners. And many people — Deb included — turn first to the cartoons when they get their copy of the New Yorker. So why shouldn’t entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs use that human impulse to their advantage?

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Which has helped your career more?

A. Positive Feedback B. Negative Feedback

If you’re like most of the people we’ve recently surveyed, you answered “B.” Praise is always good to hear, but 57% preferred to hear constructive criticism. There’s no mystery why. Practically three quarters of them thought their performance would improve and their careers advance if their managers gave them corrective feedback.

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Venture capital funding is a great tool for entrepreneurs, but its implications are often not fully understood. Here's what VC-seekers need to know.  

 Image: iStockphoto/darak77 Nearly $27 billion dollars was invested by venture capitalists in 2012. That $27 billion was invested across 3,723 deals, making the average deal hover at a little over $7 million.

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MIT professor Yael V. Hochberg revealed the most effective startup accelerators in the country Tuesday at SXSW in Austin. DreamIt Health showed up in slot No. 15 and was the only health-focused accelerator on the list.

Hochberg is a professor of finance at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She and professor Susan Cohen of the University of Richmond and the Batten Institute at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, used original research and data from CrunchBase to rank the 15 accelerators.

Accepting cash in the form of VC funding is not the right choice for all entrepreneurs or business models. Although money is always tight, some startup founders decide that they want to go about fundraising a different way—one that doesn't involve giving away big pieces of the equity pie.

Eleven entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) offer some tips for raising money without relying on venture capital:

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Everyone can recognize a great manager a mile away, so why is it so hard to find one? We all remember a few that are “legends in their own mind”, but that doesn’t do it. In fact, the clue here is that the view in your mind is the only one that matters, rather than the other way around.

Almost every one of us in business can remember that one special manager in their career who exemplifies the norm, who commanded our respect, and treated us like a friend, even in the toughest of personal or business crises.

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The night that Martin Stiksel and Felix Miller got rich, they couldn't even find a cold beer to celebrate with.

The two founders had been holed up at a law office in London for hours finalizing a deal that would result in their startup, Last.fm, getting acquired by CBS for $280 million. It was after 11 p.m. when the deal was done. The air conditioner and refrigerator had turned off; whatever drinks were in the office had warmed. With little reason to linger, they took the 30-minute bus ride home and crashed for a few hours until the investor calls began early the next morning.

Image: LUMI 

As part of our series The First 100, Mashable has been introducing readers to employees 1 through 100 at successful startups such as FourSquare, BuzzFeed and BarkBox. Along the way, we've heard from early hires about how they withstood turbulence and embraced the risk and uncertainty that comes along with the nature of building a business from scratch.

"Believe it or not, the biggest difference from my first day to today is that everyone is even more passionate and driven," says Pardot's 38th hire Ryan Johnston. Like Johnston, employees who join early on in the game actually help to shape the future of the startup — hence, an invigorated passion for their little "company-that-could" grows each day.

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Applying for an accelerator program is a major decision for any company in its early years. For CoachUp, it was the right decision, and we learned a lot along the way. We launched CoachUp in 2012 and successfully went through two incubators/accelerators that same year in Boston: MassChallenge and Techstars (Boston). But as with any business decision, there were distinct pros and cons.

Image: CoachUp is a sports startup that connects athletes to private coaching across the country. CoachUp/Facebook 

Last week, genomics entrepreneur Craig Venter announced his latest venture: a company that will create what it calls the most comprehensive and complete data set on human health to tackle diseases of aging.

Human Longevity, based in San Diego, says it will sequence some 40,000 human genomes per year to start, using Illumina’s new high-throughput sequencing machines (see “Does Illumina Have the First $1,000 Genome?”). Eventually, it plans to work its way up to 100,000 genomes per year. The company will also sequence the genomes of the body’s multitudes of microbial inhabitants, called the microbiome, and analyze the thousands of metabolites that can be found in blood and other patient samples.

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The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has responsibility, in partnership with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), for advising the President on the Federal Research and Development (R&D) budget and shaping R&D priorities across those Federal agencies that have significant portfolios in science and technology. OSTP also has responsibility—with the help of the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), which is administered out of OSTP—for coordinating interagency research initiatives. It is OSTP’s mission to help develop and implement sound science and technology policies and budgets that reflect Administration priorities and make coordinated progress toward important national policy goals.

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Is a treadmill desk worth the high cost? A New York Times reporter, Amy Harmon, puts one to the test at work.

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French Tech is utterly vivid in Paris. Paris Region Lab is a team of 30 people headed by Jean-François Gallouin. Jean-François is concurrently a teacher at engineering school Ecole Centrale Paris, an active school in the playground of Entrepreneurship.

Paris Region Lab is a non profit organization initiated by Paris municipality and “Ile de France Region” in 2009. Its purpose is the development of Parisian incubators, and the support for innovative experiments over the Greater Paris territory.

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My blog had been looking tired for a year or two. The problem is that with WordPress I just found it a bit too cumbersome to change the design on my own.

I’m more of a verbal content guy. I like to get what is in my brain out into words and as you probably know I worry less about typos, grammar or – generally – visual design. I appreciate beautiful design – I just wasn’t blessed with the skill of producing it.

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Third-generation venture capitalist Tim Draper believes he has a solution for California's problems that will make the Silicon Valley safe for its wealthy: secession. In a recent interview, Draper suggested that California be divided into six states, including one dominated by the Valley and its urban annex, San Francisco.

By jettisoning California's deeply troubled components – the Central Valley, the Inland Empire, Los Angeles – the Silicon Valleyites can create their own enclave, where incomes will be far higher – $63,288 per capital compared with the $46,477 for the whole state. If adopted, Draper's proposal would mean our self-styled cognitive leaders wouldn't have to deal with interior California's massive poverty, double-digit unemployment, farmer demands for scarce water supplies or manufacturers seeking reasonable energy prices.

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Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration allowed marketing of the first device as a preventative treatment for migraine headaches. This is also the first transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) device specifically authorized for use prior to the onset of pain.

“Cefaly provides an alternative to medication for migraine prevention,” said Christy Foreman, director of the Office of Device Evaluation at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health. “This may help patients who cannot tolerate current migraine medications for preventing migraines or treating attacks.”

The tech industry saw as many ups as downs in 2013, from the (seemingly) starting revelations in the wake of the NSA/PRISM scandal to the demise of Fisker Automotive and Twitter’s highly publicized IPO.

As the year winds to a close, the Gigaom Research curators set their sights on 2014, and share thoughts on what to expect, what not to. Will the NSA revelations have any long-term effect on U.S. cloud computing or have we simply moved on? Are wearables really worth their hype? And when it comes to social business, how fast is too fast in terms of when it comes to changing the nature of the way we work?

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“I’ve seen my share of boiled frogs,” says Doug Yakola, comparing companies in crisis with the metaphorical frog that doesn’t notice the water it’s in is warming up until it’s too late. As the chief restructuring officer or CFO of more than a dozen turnaround situations over nearly two decades, Yakola has witnessed firsthand how managers back right into a crisis without recognizing that their situation is worsening. “They’re not bad managers, but they’re often working under a set of paradigms that no longer apply and letting the power of inertia carry them along.” And if they don’t realize they’re facing a crisis, they won’t know that they need to undertake a turnaround, either.

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