In recent years, patenting has been considered one of the major drivers for enhancing national competitiveness and most of the advanced countries have been more actively enforcing patent protection. However, the indicators proposed in previous studies have not been able to deal adequately with the various dimensions of patenting, rather focusing on patent application counts. Therefore, in this research, a comprehensive patent performance indicator is proposed to provide a yardstick by which government policymakers can evaluate the whole process of converting patents into economic assets. The detailed steps of this research include: opting for the dimensions – creation, administration, utilization and environment (also the most emphasized in the prior studies) – in order to derive individual indicators; proposing a composite patent performance indicator by adopting the corresponding weights for each indicator calculated from the AHP method; and finally demonstrating the differences between the proposed indicator and the previous count-based patent indicator, and comparing the results for the 30 OECD countries.