Willing, Able, Ready: Basics and Policy Implications of Readiness as a Key Component For Implementation of Evidence-Based Interventions.

The policy brief explores readiness as a necessary component for implementing evidence-based interventions (EBIs). It begins by identifying three components of readiness that organizations should address when implementing new EBIs: motivation of people within the organization to adopt new EBIs, general organizational capacities, and intervention-specific capacities. The brief then explains: when considering an organization’s readiness for implementing EBIs, it is helpful to consider the constructs of motivation, general capacity, and intervention-specific capacity and that this relationship is represented in the heuristic R=MC2; policymakers may include targeted questions about readiness in funding opportunity announcements (FOAs) and develop criteria to evaluate answers to these questions to incorporate information about readiness when choosing grantees; practitioner organizations should assess their readiness before implementing an EBI to better understand their technical assistance needs, and should also assess organizational readiness throughout the life cycle of a program to foster continuous program improvement; policymakers interested in future research on readiness could consider determining commonalities and differences in FOAs across federal agencies, and researching the differential effectiveness of different types of technical assistance provided based on the readiness of an organization; and researchers should explore the weights of various subcomponents of the R=MC2 heuristic to establish high priority areas for training and technical assistance (TTA). 4 tables and 19 references.