Mapping innovation clusters

Without getting too politically-charged here, I find their association of the word innovation with patents to be awkward.

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".

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.