Can we manage innovation like quality?

The February issue of Interactions, the publication of the ACM Human Computer Interface community, contained an interesting article about innovation. The author of the piece, Hugh Dubberly, states that it is common for businesses nowadays to manage quality. All kinds of methodologies help organisations to improve quality, think of all the Japanese thinking in this area. Almost everybody knows the popular methods like Kaizen, Total Quality Management (TQM) and Six Sigma. With this spread, says Dubberly, quality becomes a commodity: it is necessary but not enough.
He proposes that innovation is the next frontier were businesses can make the needed competitive differentiation. But unlike quality, there are no common methodologies that translate innovation into a unified model. There are a lot of books of course, but Dubberly went on a quest to create discussion models. Necessary, because innovation is much harder to qualify compared to quality. Quality works within existing paradigms (you cannot improve the quality of something that does not exist) while innovation depends on the evolution of paradigms. Ironically, I think, much of the quality improvements come from innovative thinking, but that's besides the discussion.

The result of Dubberly's quest is a large map (downloadable as a PDF) that perhaps is not easy to grasp in one quick view, but is certainly interesting to have a look at. Reading the map, I recognize that most organisations have a lot to learn and incorporate before innovation processes are as understood as quality processes.