This chapter explores how Tencent’s marketised management approach enhances resource allocation, promotes dynamic minds, stimulates employees’ self-motivation, and boosts the organisation’s innovation, with a focus on its internal mobility programme, Flowing Water (活水), launched in 2012. Tencent not only fosters an open and distinctive ‘flowing water’ culture but also develops a digital platform that allows employees to freely apply for internal positions, thereby promoting and improving internal mobility policies. Tencent’s commitment to information sharing and transparency in the process further supports the effectiveness of the programme. Flowing Water not only aids skill development and career growth for employees but also ensures a flexible and agile talent supply, retaining top performers in a highly competitive environment. It contributes to knowledge sharing, internal cooperation, and the adaptability of business units. Ultimately, this programme plays a critical role in supporting Tencent’s innovation and organisational agility through continuous, self-driven talent circulation.

Chapter 8 examines how industry analyst rankings have evolved into contested sites of competition in the digital economy. Rankings structure rivalry by positioning vendors against one another in a public hierarchy, producing pressures that extend far beyond technical performance. Vendors respond strategically – cultivating analyst relationships, mobilising internal teams, and attempting to game evaluation criteria. Over time, gaming gives way to more sophisticated strategic responses, as vendors learn to exploit or resist rivalries. The chapter conceptualises rankings as arenas of ‘managed competition’, where promissory narratives are as critical as product capabilities. Rankings thus act as both evaluative tools and market-shaping mechanisms, orchestrating rivalry and innovation trajectories. By illuminating how rankings reconfigure competition, the chapter extends strategy research to highlight how vendors engage in ‘ranking strategy’ – a distinctive set of practices aimed at navigating and influencing evaluative infrastructures in the digital economy.

Product development has been a core driver of Tencent’s success since its inception. This chapter investigates the company’s approach to product innovation through two contrasting examples: the long-established QQ, launched in 1999, and the more recent Tencent Docs, introduced in 2017. QQ transformed from a basic messaging tool into a dynamic, revenue-generating platform by embracing iterative innovation, differentiating itself from WeChat, and sustaining strong engagement – especially among younger users. The team preserved QQ’s foundational strengths while deploying micro-innovations and agile strategies to address niche market needs. In contrast, Tencent Docs, a collaborative document-sharing solution akin to Google Docs, showcases strategic innovation rooted in Tencent’s deep B2C expertise. Leveraging its expansive consumer base and social media capabilities, the team executed a B2C-to-B2B transition that enabled rapid adoption in China’s enterprise productivity market. Together, these cases illustrate Tencent’s internal culture of intrapreneurship, user-centric design, and inclusive, agile development – key ingredients for fast-paced innovation and enduring product relevance.

Tencent’s well-known ‘horse racing’ programme, launched two decades ago, encourages multiple teams to independently and proactively develop similar products, fostering competition for internal resources and more innovation efforts. This approach has led to major innovative and successful products like WeChat and Honor of Kings. This chapter argues that Tencent’s innovation thrives on a dynamic mix of internal competition and cooperation – what we term ‘coopetition’. While often overlooked by scholars and underestimated by business leaders, coopetition at Tencent has proven central to generating creative ideas, energising teams, and enabling cross-functional knowledge recombination. Remarkably, this process was not designed by executives through a top-down mechanism but rather happened naturally from Tencent’s culture of autonomy and tolerance for risk. Rich interview evidence reveals how coopetition enhances individual growth, team development, and product competitiveness, contributing to Tencent’s overall innovation capacity.

Chapter 4 examines the analyst briefing as a critical arena where hype is tested, negotiated, and reshaped. Entrepreneurs, accustomed to investor storytelling, often struggle to recalibrate their narratives for analysts, who probe, challenge, and demand coherence with market frameworks. Drawing on unique fieldwork access, the chapter documents how narratives undergo iterative repair as entrepreneurs work with analyst relations (AR) experts to align claims with evaluative expectations. Analysts are portrayed not as passive recipients but as active co-producers of credible narratives, engaging in what Knorr Cetina terms ‘proxy-ethnographies’ to assess deliverability. This process extends entrepreneurial storytelling beyond investor contexts into broader market-shaping activities. Analyst briefings emerge as pivotal sites of ‘taming hype’, where exaggerated claims are moderated, restructured, and, in some cases, elevated into credible categories.

This chapter summarises the defining features of Tencent’s innovation model, highlighting its sequoia-like innovation (deep, directed, invisible, and compound), market-type organisation, and OCEAN ecosystem, which fosters Openness, Coopetition, Empowerment, Autonomy, and stakeholder Needs. We reveal how Tencent balances internal competition and collaboration, empowers teams, and builds an inclusive platform ecosystem. Beyond robust in-house R&D, Tencent’s edge lies in deep innovation grounded in first-principles thinking, user insight, and market acuity. Its invisible and compound innovation seamlessly integrates technological, strategic, organisational, and social dimensions – often imperceptible to users yet foundational to its impact. The chapter summarises how Tencent’s digitally enabled management practices generate value across stakeholders, and how its value-directed innovation serves not only commercial objectives but also societal, governmental, and industry-wide needs. Concluding with the introduction of an open corporate innovation system framework, this chapter outlines key implications for innovation research and practice in the digital age.

This chapter explores the motivations behind Tencent’s creation of social value, examines the various forms and models it has developed, and analyses the key factors that enable its successful implementation. The creation of social value is deeply influenced by Tencent’s values of ‘tech for good’. This core value is emphasised at a strategic level within Tencent’s various departments. Tencent has established a model for creating social value that involves the interactions between technological, product, and business model innovation. Based on these interactions, various business departments are involved in social value creation, which has been integrated into their daily business operations. Tencent has leveraged its platform capabilities to cultivate ecosystems for social value co-creation, which facilitates connections between and collaborations among diverse external stakeholders. In doing so, Tencent has created multifaceted social value across diverse scenarios, such as rural revitalisation, disaster response and relief, and carbon neutrality.

This chapter investigates how organisations navigate decision-making in environments saturated with hype. Building on the ‘used apple policy’ dilemma, it shows how uncertainty forces decision-makers to act without reliable metrics, compelling reliance on promissory narratives and emerging evaluative tools. The chapter situates hype at the centre of organisational strategy, not as noise but as a resource that structures attention and action. It highlights the paradox of decision-making under conditions where hype is simultaneously misleading and necessary. The analysis reveals how evaluative infrastructures – rankings, categories, and analyst frameworks – provide provisional anchors that enable managers to commit resources despite incomplete knowledge. By tracing how hype generates urgency and compels action, the chapter underscores the centrality of hype to contemporary capitalism and introduces the ‘business of hype’ – a growing industry dedicated to producing, evaluating, and monetising promissory products.

This chapter explores how industry analysts construct categories to order the complex and dynamic field of digital innovation. Categories, presented through visual and textual devices, enable clients to make sense of the ‘sea of hype’ and discern promising technologies from transient fashions. The analysis shows how categories are built around client concerns, foregrounding usability, business value, and strategic alignment rather than technical novelty alone. These categories are not static: some endure, while others quickly vanish, reflecting the contested and provisional nature of market ordering. The chapter situates category work as a form of hype work, showing how categories create ‘protected spaces’ that foster emerging innovations. By tracing the visual, rhetorical, and evaluative processes involved, it demonstrates that categories are central promissory products that tame hype, constituting innovation arenas where futures are selectively legitimised and market order is continually renegotiated.

Chapter 6 investigates the Gartner Hype Cycle Chart (HCC) as one of the most influential tools for structuring technological expectations. The HCC translates unruly waves of hype into a visual trajectory, offering managers and investors guidance on when to invest and when to hold back. The chapter shows how analysts blend calculative rationales with affective elements, embedding hype into a processual framework that is both explanatory and prescriptive. It theorises the HCC as a mechanism of ‘hype purification’, where speculative claims are translated into credible and actionable advice. This purification reconciles contradictory pressures: leveraging hype’s mobilising force while mitigating its risks. By shaping organisational timing and investment strategies, the HCC exemplifies how promissory products extend processes of hype management. The chapter demonstrates that far from neutral, such tools are powerful market-making devices that actively configure technological futures.

This chapter examines the meteoric rise of WeChat, one of Tencent’s most iconic innovations. Originally launched in 2011 as a messaging app, WeChat rapidly evolved into a multifunctional platform and an all-in-one super app, integrating services such as WeChat Pay, Moments, Mini Programs, and Video Channels. The chapter analyses how WeChat’s success lies in its deep understanding of user needs, achieved through a blend of first-principles product thinking and iterative refinement. It highlights how WeChat embodies invisible, compound, and continuous innovation across technological, product, procedural, and business model dimensions. The chapter also explores its pivotal role in cultivating an open, decentralised ecosystem that supports shared growth. This ecosystem emerged through three key mechanisms: enhancing internal product capabilities; empowering partners through fair, decentralised value creation; and supporting third-party service providers. WeChat offers a compelling illustration of how digital platforms can shape adaptive, multifunctional ecosystems that serve a broad spectrum of market demands.