Recent developments in the insurance industry embrace various BInsurance 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.

The rise of chatbots poses new possibilities to link social interactions within instant messengers with thirdparty systems and business processes. While many companies use chatbots within the enterprise in the form of Slack apps and integrations, little is known about their affordances. Grounded in a qualitative research endeavour, we conducted 12 explorative interviews in 8 organizational settings to inductively gain rich contextual insights. Our results reveal 14 functional affordances in 4 categories, elucidating how their actualization leads to the perception of higher level affordances and constraints. First, we discuss how chatbots augment social information systems with affordances of traditional enterprise systems, and therefore, enable bottom-up automation. Second, we elaborate on how the actualization of an affordance by one user may facilitate its perception by other users. Thus, we contribute towards a better understanding of how chatbots create value.

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