A study from Türkiye has developed an Agrivoltaic Innovation Index (AII) for assessing research-driven innovation in agrivoltaics.
The researchers say existing reviews and bibliometric studies largely focus on publication growth, system typologies, or localized techno-economic performance, without providing a quantitative framework to assess innovation readiness across the global research landscape. It describes the AII as a “composite scientometric indicator” that allows for the multidimensional structure of innovation in agrivoltaic research to be considered away from publication numbers and citation counts.
Professor Ekici, the paper’s corresponding author, told pv magazine the index evaluates research through four lenses.
The first, conceptual, covers originality and interdisciplinary reach, while the second, translational, accounts for proximity to real-world farm application. The third index, network, encompasses knowledge distribution across countries and institutions and the final index, societal, addresses sustainability and local policy needs.
The AII uses an entropy-based weighting to enable comparative assessment of papers, institutions and countries. “This theoretical structure distinguishes innovation readiness from general research performance by requiring co-evolutionary progress across all four dimensions, rather than rewarding any single metric in isolation,” the research paper explains.
Ekici said that the most important finding was that the highest volume of research does not always equate to the best innovation.
“While countries like China and the U.S. produce the most papers, their industry “readiness” is often average due to the incremental nature of the work,” Ekici said. “Conversely, several smaller nations with lower outputs are producing highly sophisticated, “innovation-ready” research focused on real-world problem solving.”
The index features data from 1,365 agrivoltaic publications spanning 2011 to 2016 covering 107 countries. Analysis in the research paper places European and East Asian nations in higher AII tiers. It says Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Switzerland demonstrated high mean AII even with moderate publication volumes, while Italy, Spain and Greece displayed mid AII scores with high publication volumes and strong internal variance. Eastern European countries showed lower volume with stronger internal variance.
“Agrivoltaic research can advance from experimental demonstrations to scalable and policy-relevant applications in these regions because they usually combine high technological readiness, efficient knowledge transfer and moderate to strong conceptual innovation,” the paper explains.
The analysis continues that many countries in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and parts of South and Southeast Asia exhibit lower overall AII values, despite the presence of locally innovative and sustainability-oriented studies. “The limiting factors are not a lack of scientific capability, but rather weak diffusion mechanisms, fragmented collaboration structures, and constrained pathways toward applied deployment,” the paper says.
Ekici added that the index serves as a diagnostic map to help policymakers move towards funding the right connections, rather than just more projects.
“Governments can use the index to identify specific gaps, such as strong technology coupled with poor knowledge sharing, and create policies to address those weaknesses,” Ekici said. “This ensures research moves out of the laboratory and onto farms to tackle food and energy shortages.”
The paper singles out countries including Burkina Faso, Benin, Kenya, Tanzania, Senegal and Niger as nations with fewer published papers but higher AII scores.
“This suggests that although agrivoltaics has not yet spread widely throughout their academic systems, the existing projects are typically very focused and frequently address urgent local needs, such as rural electrification, water-energy-food security, and land-use optimization under resource constraints,” the paper explains. “These high-AII, low-volume nations have particular yet strategically significant innovation clusters that stand to gain the most from international cooperation and support.”
The index, developed by researchers Sami Ekici and Masud Kabir based at Firat University, is presented in the paper Agrivoltaic innovation index: A composite scientometric tool for tracking global research readiness, available in the journal Engineering Science and Technology.
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