Interactive visualization of 2013 Thomson Reuter's Global Innovators Study

http://datagoldminer.com/innovators-thomson-reuters/

by Charlesmigli • 13 years ago

44 15 13 years ago

Osmium• 13 years ago

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.

edelans• 13 years ago

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/ ) into a sexier and more meaningful visualization.

k2enemy• 13 years ago

It isn't even a nice visualization. You have to hover over a ball to find out the company? An old fashioned list that can be grouped by country or industry would communicate the information much faster.

oscilloscope2• 13 years ago

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).

jere• 13 years ago

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

casca• 13 years ago

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.

oscilloscope2• 13 years ago

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

aw3c2• 13 years ago

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.

nkoren2• 13 years ago

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?"

csmatt• 13 years ago

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.

nkoren2• 13 years ago

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...

danso• 13 years ago

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...

notjustanymike2• 13 years ago

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.

notjustanymike2• 13 years ago

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.

jsmcgd• 13 years ago

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.

Interactive visualization of 2013 Thomson Reuter's Global Innovators Study

Related Stories