This chapter describes Tencent’s development history, its transformation of corporate strategies, its core business distribution, the adjustments it has made to organisational structure, and its innovative developments in both product offerings and the technology it uses, describing how all of this happened in the context of the development of the internet industry in China over the past twenty-five years. The chapter summarises the innovation milestones of Tencent’s products and services, such as the multiple iterations of the instant messaging services QQ and WeChat, and shows how it developed its businesses through major strategic investments and venture capital in many fields. It also describes Tencent’s R&D endeavours and provides a detailed picture of its technological innovation over the past two decades. The chapter also compares Tencent’s patent applications with those of other foreign and domestic companies, showing Tencent’s leading position globally and domestically in this category.

Chapter 2 develops the conceptual foundations for studying hype. Synthesising insights from Science and Technology Studies, Organisation and Management Theory, Cultural Entrepreneurship, and Economic Sociology, it positions hype as distinct yet overlapping with adjacent concepts such as bubbles, fashions, and organising visions. The chapter advances seven tenets for analysing hype, emphasising its collective rather than individual origins, its cyclical promise–requirement dynamics, and its shifting role across the innovation lifecycle. Hype is treated as both performative — enacting futures — and reflexive — subject to recalibration as evidence emerges. Special attention is given to accountability mechanisms, which are increasingly shaping expectations of whether ventures can ‘live up to the hype’. This framework reorients scholarly debate from moralising accounts of deception to the situated practices and infrastructures that sustain hype. By formalising these tenets, the chapter provides a conceptual platform for the empirical chapters that follow.

This chapter analyses how industry analysts identify, evaluate, and promote disruptive ventures through designations such as ‘Cool Vendor’, ‘Innovator’, or ‘Market Disruptor’. These endorsements act as powerful funnelling devices, amplifying some narratives while marginalising others. The chapter interrogates the paradox of analysts as both critical evaluators and active promoters of the innovations they assess. Drawing on valuation studies, it distinguishes between evaluation (assessing worth) and valorisation (creating worth), showing how analysts simultaneously constrain speculative excess while conferring legitimacy. Through empirical cases, the chapter reveals the dual role analysts play as gatekeepers and amplifiers in the digital economy. By legitimising select start-ups, they transform localised narratives into widely recognised signals of market potential. This valorisation process illustrates how hype is not merely curtailed but actively channelled into market-making dynamics, underscoring the analysts’ central role in the institutionalisation of hype.

This chapter presents the key features that make Tencent a stand-out case in the global digital landscape, spotlighting the rapid growth of WeChat in both user base and functionality as evidence of the company’s ascent to the forefront of digital innovation. It outlines the rationale and objectives of the book, explaining why Tencent was chosen as a focal point for examining innovation in the digital era. By previewing the book’s structure and central themes, the chapter introduces the concept of Tencent’s distinctive innovation management – including its unique model and the underlying drivers of its success. It also positions the book’s contribution within the broader discourse on innovation management and practice in the digital economy, offering insights relevant to scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers.

This chapter synthesises the book’s empirical findings to theorise the transformation from ‘hype in the wild’ to ‘tamed hype’. It shows how industry analysts and AR experts have created managed channels through which promissory narratives are scrutinised, recalibrated, and legitimised. The chapter introduces the concept of a ‘managed spiral of promissory products’, capturing how rankings, categories, and tools recursively structure expectations. Hype is no longer merely unbounded speculation but a set of institutionalised practices embedded in market infrastructures. Yet wild hype persists, and taming efforts often generate new speculative momentum, underscoring hype’s recursive and generative dynamics. By theorising taming as reclaiming, navigating, domesticating, and cultivating hype, the chapter highlights how wild hype is stabilised without eliminating uncertainty. The analysis situates hype management as a constitutive practice of digital capitalism, raising broader implications for innovation governance and market order.

The concluding chapter proposes ‘Hype Studies’ as a new interdisciplinary field concerned with the institutionalisation, evaluation, and strategic management of promissory narratives. It synthesises insights across different disciplines to argue for a symmetrical sociology of hype that treats it neither as deception nor mere enthusiasm, but as a structuring force of innovation economies. The chapter identifies key research directions, including the professionalisation of hype expertise, reflexivity in hype practices, the role of rankings in shaping competitive stratification, and the management of speculative cycles. It also calls for extending analysis beyond the digital economy to other promissory economies more broadly, comparing how hype is differently tamed across sectors. Finally, it considers the ethical and political dimensions of hype, outlining the possibility of ‘responsible hype’ as a mode of engaging with technological futures.