

Interactive visualization of 2013 Thomson Reuter's Global Innovators Study - Charlesmigli
http://datagoldminer.com/innovators-thomson-reuters/

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oscilloscope
A couple critiques. The "No Breakout" view is almost meaningless. It would be
more effective as a ranked list with words. If I take a screenshot of that, it
means nothing. Circle positions, sizes, and colors encode no information in
this initial view. The only way to get information is to hover, letting you
browse the list in a disorganized fashion.

It's not clear on load what colors represent. There are no labels whatsoever.
The colors make more sense on the "Country Breakout", but you lose the context
again if you go to the "Industry Breakout". The last breakout also seems
somewhat arbitrary. According to this, Google is part of "Internet Search".
Don't they make hardware and software as well? Is IBM still a hardware
company? The lines are fuzzy, but this categorical view draws a sharp divide
between different sectors.

The graphic this is based on, Four Ways to Slice Obama's Budget Proposal,
contains much more information and labels it well.

[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/13/us/politics/20...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/13/us/politics/2013-budget-
proposal-graphic.html)

Notice that circle area encodes proposed spending, which is a good measure of
size/importance. The coloring is also a quantitative metric with an associated
scale. When you go to the "Department Totals" view, you can see how the
size/coloring reveals insights about proposed Defense spending (heavy cuts).

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jere
Yea, I was going to post that the initial No Breakout view conveys absolutely
no information. The colors haven't yet been explained, the circles are all the
same size, and... there are 100 of them (but we already know that). Hovering
over dots to find more information is really low bandwith.

Another point: the top category on the Industry Breakout view is obscured by
the drop down. It wouldn't be such a big deal, but that category is probably
_the most important_.

Also, selecting options from the drop down can leave you hovering over a
different company, which creates a new hover tooltip. That's pretty confusing.

And a typo in the title: itsself

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notjustanymike
It's a pretty stock force chart that would probably would have been a lot more
useful as a horizontal bar chart. The industry breakout is useless without a
legend since I have to switch to country breakout to understand what the
colors mean. The circles don't quantify any data, especially unhelpful when
you could have used the unique inventions metric to indicate a company's
contribution.

So yeah, this is sexy, but also quite useless.

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nkoren
Visualization, shmisulization. Only so much that bouncy balls can do to sex up
a strangely parochial list. No ARM, no Tesla. But Blackberry is on the list?
Seriously? How many CEOs are currently asking themselves "how can we be more
innovative, like Blackberry?"

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csmatt
A failure of Blackberry to have a respectable market share does not mean the
company isn't innovative. I think any company with its back against the wall
is probably attempting to be innovative at every turn.

~~~
nkoren
In theory, they certainly should be. However in practice that's not always the
case. What significant innovations has Blackberry brought to market in the
past three years (the timeframe this list covers)? Offhand I can't think of
any.

I haven't delved into the list's methodology, but at a glance it appears to
basically be a count of in-house patents, which is a reasonable approximation
of the amount of innovation a company produces multiplied by the number of
patent lawyers on its payroll. If the second variable is large enough, the
first one need not be that significant...

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jsmcgd
Sorry to be a grump but I think we're actually worse off for having these very
shallow and simplistic analyses of data. Also, patent != innovation.

That being said aesthetically it's very pleasing and with some rigour there
might be something of value here.

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Osmium
Nice visualisation, but what's the value in this? Symantec's a "global
innovator" (really? I'm skeptical, but am I missing something?) And splitting
companies into "electronic components" and "computer hardware" seems dubious
too, since there's presumably a lot of overlap.

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edelans
You should blame Thomson Reuter's report for that, as I understand it, this
page is an attempt to make a boring ranking
([http://top100innovators.com/](http://top100innovators.com/) ) into a sexier
and more meaningful visualization.

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casca
Pretty use of D3.js. Obviously this is your business but it would be great if
there was some sourcecode to share with the community.

The report that the data is based on is not worth much. They claim to use
Volume, Success, Global and Influence as measures. Apply this the Blackberry
and Symantec and decide the value.

~~~
oscilloscope
There's a step-by-step guide to creating this kind of animated chart by Jim
Vallandingham.

[http://vallandingham.me/bubble_charts_in_d3.html](http://vallandingham.me/bubble_charts_in_d3.html)

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aw3c2
Why not add the country code into the circles? Right now it is relying on
color alone and that is bad. Firstly there is no intuitive or learned
connection between a color and a country and secondly it is problematic for
people with bad color vision.

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danso
I knew it. When I saw the title with "D3" and "sexy" (or some other over-used
overhyped adjective), I just knew it was going to involve some non-sensical
clump of animated balls. This is far less useful than even a simple table.

If you're going to do balls in D3, at least do it with force:

[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/09/04/us/politics/de...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/09/04/us/politics/democratic-
convention-words.html)

~~~
notjustanymike
You're right. The best visualizations wouldn't care about the library used to
build them. By putting D3 in the title, it becomes obvious the authors care
more about the technology than the content.

