Sparking stakeholder support: Creating personas for renewable energy innovation adoption based on qualitative data analysis

Abstract

The success of innovations hinges on the relevant stakeholders' perceptions. While the success of some innovations—for example, those related to consumer products—often depends on only one stakeholder, the buyer, the success of other innovations, such as renewable energy sources, depends on multiple stakeholders. The traditional trend of focusing on only one stakeholder, the buyer, bears the risk of failing innovation adoption simply because it ignores other relevant stakeholders. We show the potential value of personas for the adoption and acceptance by multiple stakeholders of innovations related to renewable energy. We introduce personas as a qualitative research method because they offer clear and memorable access to relevant stakeholders' needs, goals, and frustrations regarding an innovation. We provide a valuable blueprint of a persona development process based on an acknowledged qualitative research method–thematic analysis. We also offer guidelines on developing personas and showcase how rigorous qualitative research can address existing critiques of persona development methods. Our study includes a case example of persona development based on 27 semi-structured interviews with different stakeholders of our case of agrivoltaics. Agrivoltaics is a dual land-use approach in which crop and energy production are combined in a complementary beneficial relationship. Based on this case, we demonstrate how personas offer a valuable qualitative research method to achieve better innovation development and adoption based on the perceptions of critical stakeholders toward innovations in society.