[1] It aims to understand the most effective pathways from research to practical application, particularly in areas such as health, education, psychology and management.
"[3] The WHO identifies four notable characteristics of implementation research: it is systematic, multidisciplinary, contextual, and complex.
As a consequence, controlled experiments widely used in educational research at times are hard to reproduce and it is difficult to disseminate their results in real-life setting.
As a way to address such problems, in the 20th century a range of methodologies that study real-life learning processes were developed.
More recently more structured methodologies that apply iterative changes to a learning process have been developed, notably design-based research.