Kaila White

The Republic | azcentral.com

The University of Arizona ranked No. 63 on Reuters Top 100: The World's Most Innovative Universities list released Wednesday.

Arizona State University was notably absent from the list. Earlier this month, U.S. News & World Report named ASU the most innovative school among national universities for the second year in a row.

The top five on the Reuters list are Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the University of Texas system and the University of Washington system.

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"The list ranks the educational institutions doing the most to advance science, invent new technologies and help drive the global economy," the news release said.

The Reuters list "relies exclusively on empirical data such as patent filings and research paper citations."

In comparison, U.S. News' list is based on a survey asking college presidents, provosts and admissions deans to nominate up to 10 universities they find innovative.

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Reuters ranked "University of Arizona and Board of Regents," combining UA with the Arizona Board of Regents, which oversees all three public universities in the state, because of the way UA processes patent applications.

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"In the case of Arizona, we found that patents originating at Arizona's public universities are usually assigned to something like 'Arizona Board of Regents on Behalf of the University of Arizona,' which is why we used 'University of Arizona and Board of Regents' to identify the entire system," Reuters spokeswoman Heather Carpenter said in an email.

Beyond UA's numerous inventions and patent applications, Reuters mentioned startups launched out of the university and its Arizona Center for Innovation.

"In the fiscal year ending in June 2016, UA reported 250 invention disclosures as well as 150 provisional and 102 utility patent applications. Fourteen startups were launched out of the university and UA executed 97 licenses and option agreements," Reuters wrote.

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However, ASU is the only Arizona university that made the National Academy of Inventors and the Intellectual Property Owners Association list of the Top 100 Worldwide Universities Granted U.S. Utility Patents in 2015. ASU ranked No. 38 with 55 patents, up from No. 40 in 2014.

Last year, the Reuters’ list ranked UA No. 55 and ASU No. 86.

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