Management, Innovation, and Future Health (MISF Chair)

Sandra Charreire Petit*

Professor in Management Sciences

Paris-Saclay University – RITM (research center in economics and management)

*Member of the faculty of the Executive DBA Paris-Saclay / Business Science Institute

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Healthcare is a specific area of research for management, with particularly significant individual, collective, and societal challenges. Prevention, healthcare organization, the use of technology (e-health), caregiving (Coelho & al., 2020), the recruitment and retention of healthcare workers, and the management of access to good health for all are all challenges that must be addressed in order to care for tomorrow's aging population, whose illnesses are becoming chronic, while keeping costs under control.

The global Covid-19 health crisis (2020-2023) has reminded every government how essential the organization of their healthcare systems and their ability to renew themselves are, including in terms of logistics. Before and since the pandemic, numerous technological (particularly e-health) and organizational (multidisciplinary health centers, new services, and care practices) innovations have emerged. Depending on one's point of view, these are watched as progress that benefits patients or as a means of controlling or containing rising costs. In France, a “patient-centered” approach has been encouraged since the early 2000s. According to the Haute Autorité de Santé (HAS) in 2024, the aim is to establish “a partnership between the patient, their loved ones, and the healthcare professional or multidisciplinary team in order to jointly develop a care plan, monitor its implementation, and adjust it over time.”

New topics for management research

Among the relevant questions to be explored from the perspective of management sciences and management in relation to the future of healthcare, some are more urgent and useful than others in order to better understand the changes currently underway. These include the digitization of healthcare, patient empowerment, patient-caregiver-carer relationships, innovation processes in this very specific field, gender considerations, occupational health, and the governance and management of healthcare institutions to meet the challenges of tomorrow's healthcare.

Patients are increasingly being watched by digital tools to take charge of their health and participate in decision-making (patient empowerment) via apps. Caregivers use these devices in turn to monitor and remotely control their patients' health and, where necessary, prepare for consultations. This approach is radically transforming the way healthcare institutions operate, as well as patient-caregiver relationships, by changing the relationship of proximity in care (Charreire Petit & Talbot, 2023) or the very perception of this proximity (Talbot, Charreire Petit & Pokrovsky, 2020).

Innovation, gender, and AI: areas to explore

Taking an interest in healthcare innovation also means questioning the specific nature of processes that are often difficult to finance, highly international, and involve numerous public and private stakeholders with divergent or even opposing interests. The literature on healthcare innovation is rich, but many questions remain unanswered or deserve further study. The very early stages of innovation, such as clinical trials, are often very illuminating in terms of better understanding the management of these processes and their impact on the health of both men and women (Charreire Petit & Coron, 2025). Gender in health remains an overlooked issue with serious consequences (McGregor & Choo, 2012; Le Hen & Le Moël, 2025), and many topics related to innovation management remain largely unexplored in this regard.

The role of AI in the future development of innovations, as well as in the practice of diagnosis and care, remains largely to be explored. Deploying innovations with the aim of improving patient care requires thinking in terms of care pathways and, beyond that, life pathways, i.e., considering health from a global and multidisciplinary perspective. This is the “global health” approach. In particular, it means taking greater account of nutrition, but also of the patient's environment, especially their work environment.

Health at work is a real concern, for example for companies that are increasingly faced with employee burnout, or for society in general, which struggles to bear the financial cost of this often long-term condition. Taking an interest in the management and organization of healthcare systems also requires a good understanding of patients' behaviors and choices in terms of health. Public decision-makers would benefit from learning more about them in order to better integrate them into care pathways (Pokrovsky et al., 2022). From a theoretical and managerial perspective, this set of concerns ties in with the societal challenge of health and well-being that Paris-Saclay University aims to address, in synergy with the EUGLOH (European University Alliance for Global Health) alliance, which Paris-Saclay University coordinates and which links human, animal, and environmental health.

Governance and complexity of healthcare systems

The governance of healthcare institutions (particularly hospitals) remains highly complex (compartmentalization, multiple lines of authority, sometimes direct tensions between administrative, medical, and paramedical spheres, with strong professional identities and cultures (Gilbert & Laporte, 2022, 2023). Technological innovations do not necessarily make these types of relationships more fluid. For example, when engineers enter the augmented operating room, they must deal with a professional identity and specific skills that are additional to those already present in an operating room. These specificities potentially constitute difficulties for healthcare providers, but also for patients and their families. This often makes it necessary to articulate the individual, collective, and organizational levels differently, but also to consider the interests and limitations of the various stakeholders.

A space to build and share knowledge

It is not possible here to exhaust all the challenges and issues in healthcare that management research can address, but it is possible to establish a framework for thinking about management, innovation, and healthcare in the future. This is precisely the purpose of the MISF (Management Innovation and Future Health) chair that I co-host at Paris-Saclay University with Marie-Eve Laporte. In 2025, this chair will bring together some 15 faculty members and a dozen doctoral students. Our work is organized around three areas: health & innovation, health & nutrition, and health & work.

EDBA managers interested in management and health will thus benefit from an enriching environment in which to develop useful knowledge, revisit frameworks of thought, and produce models for action.

References

• Charreire Petit S., Coron C., (2025 – forthcoming), « La prise en compte des femmes dans les essais cliniques : il serait temps de transformer l’essai ! » in Journal de Gestion et d’Economie de la Santé (JGES)

• Charreire Petit S., Talbot D., (2023) « Les effets des proximités sur l’apprentissage : le cas de la prise en charge de la douleur chronique en France », in numéro spécial de Management International intitulé « Le management des connaissances à l’épreuve des nouveaux « objets » de la gestion du XXIe siècle» - 27(6), 93-105. DOI: https://doi.org/10.59876/a-k34n-xz80

• Coelho, A., de Brito, M., Teixeira, P., Frade, P., Barros, L., & Barbosa, A. (2020). Family Caregivers’ Anticipatory Grief: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Its Multiple Challenges. Qualitative Health Research, 30(5), 693–703. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732319873330

• Gilbert, P., & Laporte, M.-E. (2022). War and peace in hospitals: Humans, objects and paradoxes. Journal of Business Research, 141, 253–263. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.12.015

• Gilbert, P., & Laporte, M.-E. (2023). L’orientation patient à l’hôpital public: Un dispositif marketing comme compromis entre mondes. Recherche et Applications en Marketing (French Edition), 38(1), 40–60. https://doi.org/10.1177/07673701221112692

• HAS. (2024). Les répit des aidants—Recommandation. https://www.has-sante.fr/upload/docs/application/pdf/2024-06/rbpp_repit_aidants-recommandations.pdf

• Le Hen S., Le Moël MM. (2025). Les négligées. Enquête au Coeur du business de la santé des femmes, Harper & Collins Ed. ISBN 979-1-0339-1514-0

• McGregor, A. J., & Choo, E. (2012). Gender-specific Medicine : Yesterday’s Neglect, Tomorrow’s Opportunities. Academic Emergency Medicine, 19(7), 861‑865. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1553-2712.2012.01389.x

• Pokrovsky A., Aeberhardt R., Charreire Petit S., Talbot D., (2022), "Revealing the role of subjective geographic proximity in the use of medical services: a quantitative case study in a French metropolitan suburb", in Journal de Gestion et d’Economie de la Santé (JGES), vol 4, N°9, P. 294-313.

• Talbot D., Charreire Petit S., Pokrovsky A. (2020), “La proximité comme perception de la distance : le cas de la télémédecine”, Revue Française de Gestion, vol 46, n°289, pp 54-74.