Facing rapid changes in Taiwan's educational environment, especially the homogeneity of
competition, uncertain education policies, the continuing decline in birth rate and limited resources
of funds, continuing education (CE) institutes thus are forced to make an attempt to retarget their
market and customers. Conventionally, TQM and BPR are well-known approaches for process
improvement and organizational innovation. TQM is less risky for organization to innovate and is
one for incremental improvement whereas BPR is for radical improvement. However, existing
research on TQM-innovation relationship largely focuses on manufacturing and services industries
but not education sector and most of them involves in empirically investigating TQM's likely
impacts on innovation and exploring the determinant factors of TQM that influence innovation
which are often subject to omitted effects of environmental context and probably brings to a biased
conclusion. The objective of this study is linking TQM theory to organizational innovation and
providing practitioners and researchers more insights on innovation management. To clearly depict
the TQM-innovation relationship under an organization's strategic direction, the authors develop a
system architecture named ESC (Environment-Strategy-Culture) and propose seven propositions for
further empirical testing. Finally, this study introduces a conceptual model as a benchmark to
facilitate the understanding of the organizational innovation and quality system in a CE institute.