Too Quality! Corporate professional boundary work in the drafting of the ISO management standard on innovation management

Innovation management is a pivotal issue in contemporary innovation-intensive economies. In 2019, ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, published a novel standard series on innovation management. This paper analyzes the drafting of the standard as a site for professional boundary work between innovation management, as an aspiring management profession, and the established quality management and ISO 9001. Based on fieldwork at the ISO committee TC 279, the paper identifies four occasions for textual professional boundary work ranging from negotiations of content and choice of ISO standard formats to the unprecedented high-level liaison agreements across international organizations. The analysis shows how the standard becomes positioned as extending and complementing the ISO 9001, not as a radical, freestanding alternative to quality management.