The objective of the present research Organizational innovation as an essential element to forge entrepreneurial competence in quality management applied to Higher Education Institutions was to identify the elements of organizational innovation in the Public Institutions of Higher Education in the municipality of Riohacha - Colombia. According to the above, the research responds to the descriptive, field and non-experimental model oriented to systematically detail the characteristics of the organizational innovation variable and the indicator elements of innovation in organizations. It is evident that these elements such as Necessity, Adoption, Implementation and Resources, under the theoretical position of Daft (2000), generate new approaches to good quality management so that they can be actors of innovation for the achievement of their educational objectives. From this perspective, the data were analyzed through descriptive statistics through the frequency distribution, identifying the measures, through absolute frequencies and relative frequency, where the appropriate tables for their respective analysis and discussion of the results were elaborated. The average of the frequency expressed in the three indicators was 4.2, indicating in the category of the present scale, with a standard deviation of 0.9 indicating that there is a high dispersion level of the variable, indicating that there is Dispersion of the data. Concluding under the author's position, the universities of the municipality of Riohacha assimilate the organizational innovation through a series of elements, which allow to make consent a situation or idea, evaluating it and taking them into practice.