This article explores the applicability of interdisciplinary research on the implementation of technological innovations to the field of e-learning research. Arguing that there are important ways in which e-learning systems can be treated as "technological innovations," this article presents a review of several key theoretical and research design approaches that have been developed for use in the Instructional Technology (IT) and Organisational Studies (OS) fields. The literature review presented here demonstrates the complexity of the processes associated with implementation and observes that, despite the long-standing research interest in this area, unsatisfactory implementation outcomes continue to be encountered in practice. Given a high failure rate for e-learning implementations and the field's newness relative to the IT and OS disciplines, it is argued that e-learning research could benefit from greater interaction with these literatures. This article concludes with a discussion of the ways in which IT and OS research can be amended to make them more directly applicable to e-learning systems and offers some suggestions for future research. (Contains 3 figures.)