ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the literature concerned with policy, program, or project implementation with the purpose of discovering whether prior research could provide useful insights or hypotheses. In order to review the literature on implementation, a distinction between different types of implementation needs to be made. Policy implementation has only recently come into its own as a research topic. Implementation of national plans is discussed by Bertram M. Gross in “Activating National Plans”. His basic premise is that in order to analyze plan implementation as a process, the more traditional notion of “command” must be replaced by one of “activating. “There is a large literature on the diffusion of innovations and the adoption of new technologies by state and local governments. The extent to which the private sector is willing to share the costs of the demonstration should be used as indication of its potential for successful commercialization.
