Quantifying Innovation: Intellectual Property Data as Indicators of Technology Maturity of Metal–Organic-Frameworks and Inorganic Nanoparticles

The increasing significance of intellectual property (IP) in recent decades highlights its crucial role in driving innovation and shaping competitive strategies. While many studies have attempted to evaluate the technological level of specific sectors or companies, few offer a standardized and scalable approach for cross-domain comparison. This study proposes a patent-based framework to comparatively evaluate technological maturity across different fields using a concise set of intellectual property (IP) indicators. The selected metrics, renewal trends, family size, grant rate, and citation patterns, capture legal, economic, and technological dimensions of innovation without requiring field-specific calibration. We apply this approach to two representative nanomedical technologies, Metal–Organic Frameworks (MOFs) and inorganic nanoparticles (iNPs), within the domain of cancer therapy. Our analysis highlights distinct trajectories: MOFs show increasing patent activity and sustained short-term citation growth, consistent with an emerging field; iNPs exhibit signs of stabilization and declining citation intensity, suggesting greater maturity. These findings demonstrate the utility of standardized IP indicators for mapping innovation dynamics across domains. The proposed framework offers a replicable tool for strategic technology assessment, with potential applications in research prioritization, technology forecasting, and early-stage investment analysis.