Finance

Machine learning

Engineering

Intermediary

Sociology

Business

Actuarial science

Economics

Marketing

Extant taxon

Interdependence

Management

Value (mathematics)

Complementary assets

Intermediation

Digitization

Insurance industry

Value creation

Social science

Transformational leadership

Industrial organization

Computer science

Business model

Knowledge management

Telecommunications

Evolutionary biology

Biology

Value network

Electronic Markets

Recent developments in the insurance industry embrace various "Insurance Technology" (InsurTech) innovations. To date, there is a lack of structured assessments of InsurTech. Prior research on FinTech fails (1) to clarify how InsurTech can be characterized and what capabilities are employed, and hence, (2) to reveal implications for value creation on firm and industry level. We address this by inductively building a model of InsurTech innovation adopting the grounded theory method. Our empirical data includes 208 InsurTech innovations from a market analysis based on Twitter data and a multiple-case study. The resulting model comprises 52 characteristics and 14 transformational capabilities and is integrated with extant value networks and intermediation literature. The former explains how InsurTech affects firm-level value creation and suggests that disruptive potentials emerge from aligning the transformational capabilities along three interdependent activities. The latter explains the entrance of digital intermediaries and their roles in the personal insurance market.

Exploring characteristics and transformational capabilities of InsurTech innovations to understand insurance value creation in a digital world