What Kind of Leader is Needed for Social Innovation Through Design in Healthcare? Proposal for a Conceptual Framework

The crisis facing healthcare organizations in France, owing to a shortage of healthcare workers, is nothing new, but its scale has now reached unprecedented levels since the Covid-19 health crisis. In this chapter, the authors address the notion of social innovation through design in the healthcare field, placing it in its historical context. They develop the concept of innovation leadership and present the characteristics of leaders in social innovation through design in healthcare. Leaders may possess qualities and personality traits that set them apart from others, enabling them to govern and achieve their goals more easily. In the French healthcare sector, as in the public sector as a whole, the leadership of institutional decision-makers is mainly based on “legal leadership”, which is linked to formal authority and creates a relationship of subordination, rather than “de facto leadership”, which is exclusively based on the qualities of the leader.