UA named among 'World's Most Innovative' schools

The University of Arizona has again been recognized as one of the world’s most innovative universities.

The UA made the second annual “Reuters Top 100 — World’s Most Innovative Universities,” based on factors including scholarly research articles, patents and commercial impact.

Arizona ranked 63rd in the survey, down from 55th last year.

The UA is the only Arizona school on the Reuters list. Arizona State University didn’t appear on this year’s list after ranking 86th on the inaugural 2015 list.

Published by the media company Thomson Reuters, the list is based on data from 2009 through 2014, including patent filings, patent success and commercial success based on patent citations by others.

Reuters said no matter where a school ranks in the Top 100, it is making a significant global contribution.

“It’s important to remember that whether a university ranks at the top or the bottom of the list, it’s still within the top 100 on the planet,” technology journalist David Ewalt wrote for Reuters. “All of these universities produce original research, create useful technology and stimulate the global economy.”

David Allen, who runs the UA’s technology transfer efforts as vice president of Tech Launch Arizona, said he wasn’t surprised that UA made the grade.

The UA has upped its tech-transfer numbers every year since Tech Launch was formed in mid-2012 and beefed up the process with added licensing staff, greater outreach to faculty inventors and programs including proof-of-concept grants and expert business mentoring.

“It’s confirmation to us that we’re going in the right direction and that our intellectual property is being adopted by industry,” Allen said.

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Allen said he wouldn’t be surprised if the UA moves up in Reuters’ future rankings, based on the program’s success in the past couple of years.

For the 2016 fiscal year that ended June 30, Tech Launch Arizona reported record results and improvement across almost all measures, including a nearly 40 percent increase in patents filed and double-digit increases in disclosures and licensing.

In its listing narrative for the UA, Reuters cited the school’s estimated $8.3 billion annual economic impact and more than $606 million in research spending in fiscal 2015, along with highlights from the last fiscal year.

Faculty members filed 250 invention disclosures last fiscal year, up from 213 in 2015; filed for 278 patents on faculty inventions, up from 200 in fiscal 2015; and executed 97 options and licenses, up from 83 in 2015.

Reuters figured that about 41 percent of the 303 patent applications the UA filed from 2009 to 2014 resulted in patent awards. But the UA scored somewhat lower than average for “commercial impact” — including measures like patent citations by others, an indication of the school’s impact on commercial research and development.

Separately, the National Science Foundation ranks the UA 20th in research and development spending among U.S. public universities and colleges and 33rd among U.S. public and private universities. Those rankings are based on 2014 data.

Though it seems a new list comes out daily, Allen said rankings like the Reuters Top 100 give the university recognition, as well as a glimpse of how peers are faring.

“They give you a sense of direction and show you where you’re at relative to others,” he said.

Reuters says its ranking process starts with a list of some 600 academic and government organizations that published the greatest number of articles in scholarly journals from 2009 to 2014.

The global list also is restricted to institutions that filed 70 or more patents with the World Intellectual Property Organization during the five-year period examined by Reuters.