Interactive visualization of 2013 Thomson Reuter's Global Innovators Study (opens in new tab)

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...

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).

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...