Usable Innovations are operationalized so they are teachable, learnable, doable, assessable, and scalable in practice. Usable Innovations are effective when used as intended. Usable Innovations have a way to assess the presence and strength of the innovation as it is used in everyday practice.

Innovations are, by definition, new ways of work. New ways of work are disruptive to practitioners and organizations that must change in modest or radical ways to accommodate and support the high fidelity and effective use of an innovation by practitioners. Competency drivers, organization drivers, and leadership drivers guide the work of implementation in any organization.

Implementation is a process, not an event. The process is marked by implementation stages that have been identified in practice. To use innovations and Active Implementation in practice takes time and effort. Exploration, Installation, Initial Implementation, and Full Implementation Stages guide organization and system investments in innovations supported by implementation best practices.

Improvement cycles based on plan, do, study, act, cycle (PDSAC) methods are essential to using and scaling innovations with fidelity and good outcomes. To use innovations and implementation drivers with fidelity in practice is to invite problems and quickly resolve problems. Changes in contextual factors and the need for continual improvement to produce and scale socially significant outcomes mean the work is never done.

Expertise is required to purposefully, effectively, and efficiently support using innovations as intended to produce desired outcomes reliably and repeatedly. This expertise is developed in Implementation Teams that are formed by reassigning and repurposing current staff in organizations and systems.

Effective implementation supports for the use of effective innovations are new ways of work that are not part of the status quo. Systems must change and new structures, roles, and functions must be established to sustain and improve outcomes over time. The goal is not just to change a system one time but to establish an enabling context for producing socially significant outcomes for whole populations.