Without getting too politically-charged here, I find their association of the word <i>innovation</i> with patents to be awkward.<p>While there's no question that some of these same metro areas would appear in the top right of any chart claiming to map "innovation", I think in this case the visualization would more accurately be titled "Mapping patent clusters".<p>Are there other, perhaps better ways of measuring innovation? I can think of plenty of companies and people who are innovating but not necessarily patenting.