II-02 — Implementation Intelligence: Research and Practice Programme for the Study of Implementation
Year: 2026
Type: conference-abstract
Abstract: This paper introduces Implementation Intelligence, a research and practice programme concerned with the study of implementation itself — how things that are decided become things that are done — across sectors and independently of whether the thing decided was ever validated. It responds to a documented problem: research on implementation is fragmented across disciplines describing closely related phenomena in mutually incompatible vocabularies, with little citation contact between them, so that findings do not accumulate. The programme's central commitment is that implementation must be observed and described before it is judged and formalised as three ordered operations — observation, correspondence, and evaluation — that the programme holds strictly separate. The paper sets out the programme's object of study, its methodological commitments, and a two-tier structure distinguishing the programme itself (Tier 1) from its foundational descriptive vocabulary (Tier 2). It summarises the four foundational descriptive concepts — Implementation Conditions, Implementation Architecture, Implementation Capability, and Implementation Knowledge — and the relationships among them, without providing their full definitions, which are reserved for companion concept papers. It presents a register of twelve open empirical hypotheses, two of which are detailed as gating central features of the programme, and a register of documented failure modes, including modes specific to the programme's own descriptive method. It distinguishes the programme from implementation science on three specific axes (object, purpose, and domain), states the programme's boundaries and the evidentiary concentration of its current base, and records what the programme has explicitly refused to adopt, including candidate content and a candidate fourth concept. The paper positions Implementation Intelligence as a research and practice programme that may become a discipline, not as a discipline declared in advance, and states that none of its twelve hypotheses have yet been empirically tested.
Author: Duffour, Suzanne
Language: English
Subfield: General Health Professions
Field: Health Professions
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204934487