A study from Türkiye has introduced the Agrivoltaic Innovation Index (AII), a composite scientometric tool designed to assess innovation readiness in the field of agricultural voltaic energy, in addition to traditional publication and citation metrics. The index evaluates research on four dimensions – conceptual, translational, network and societal – and shows that a high publication volume does not necessarily correspond to a higher willingness to innovate.
A study of Turkey has developed an Agrivoltaic Innovation Index (AII) for assessing research-driven innovation in the field of agrivoltaic energy.
The researchers say that existing overviews and bibliometric studies largely focus on publication growth, system typologies or localized techno-economic performance, without providing a quantitative framework to assess innovation propensity in the global research landscape. It describes the AII as a “composite scientometric indicator” that makes it possible to disentangle the multidimensional structure of innovation in agrivoltaic research from publication numbers and citation counts.
Professor Ekici, the corresponding author of the paper, told it pv magazine the index evaluates research through four lenses.
The first, conceptual, concerns originality and interdisciplinary reach, while the second, translational, takes into account proximity to real agricultural applications. The third index, the network, covers knowledge distribution across countries and institutions, while the last index, the social one, focuses on sustainability and local policy needs.
The AII uses an entropy-based weighting to enable comparative assessment of items, institutions, and countries. “This theoretical structure distinguishes innovation propensity from general research performance by requiring co-evolutionary progress on all four dimensions, rather than rewarding a single measure in isolation,” the research article explains.
Ekici said the key finding was that the largest volume of research does not always equate to the best innovation.
“While countries like China and the US produce the most papers, their sector’s ‘willingness’ is often average due to the incremental nature of the work,” Ekici said. “Conversely, several smaller countries with lower yields are producing highly advanced, ‘innovation-ready’ research that focuses on solving real-world problems.”
The index contains data from 1,365 agrivoltaic publications from 2011 to 2016 from 107 countries. Analysis in the research paper places European and East Asian countries in higher AII levels. It says Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Switzerland showed high average AII scores even with moderate publication volumes, while Italy, Spain and Greece showed mid AII scores with high publication volumes and strong internal variance. Eastern European countries showed lower volume with stronger internal variance.
“Agrivoltaic research can evolve from experimental demonstrations to scalable and policy-relevant applications in these regions because they typically combine high technological readiness, efficient knowledge transfer, and moderate to strong conceptual innovation,” the article 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 research. “The limiting factors are not a lack of scientific capacity, but rather weak diffusion mechanisms, fragmented collaboration structures and limited pathways to applied deployment,” the article says.
Ekici added that the index serves as a diagnostic map to help policymakers fund the right connections, rather than just more projects.
“Governments can use the index to identify specific gaps, such as strong technology combined with poor knowledge sharing, and create policies to address these weaknesses,” Ekici said. “This will move research from the laboratory to farms to address food and energy shortages.”
The newspaper mentions countries such as Burkina Faso, Benin, Kenya, Tanzania, Senegal and Niger as countries with fewer published articles but higher AII scores.
“This suggests that although agrivoltaic systems have not yet spread widely within their academic systems, existing projects tend to be highly targeted and often respond to urgent local needs, such as rural electrification, water-energy-food security and land use optimization under resource constraints,” the article explains. “These high-AII, low-volume countries have special but strategically important innovation clusters that can benefit 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 Readinessavailable in the magazine Engineering sciences and technology.
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