How Can Talent Managers Create Organizational Value Throughout the Hype Cycles of Emerging and Innovative Industries?

Talent managers in emerging industries face a distinctive challenge: they must build and reconfigure talent management (TM) systems to build organizational value while stakeholder expectations, legitimacy, regulation, and capital availability continually fluctuate. Drawing on interviews with 14 experienced executives across the emerging Canadian recreational cannabis and solar industries, media and scholarly related industry research, we examine how TM challenges and responses vary across hype cycle inflection points. Extending Makram et al.’s (2017) talent value framework into a dynamic industry context, we theorize hype cycle inflection points as an organizing mechanism for talent architectures in emerging industries. Our findings show that TM value processes are temporally reweighted as industries move from innovation trigger to inflated expectations, through disillusionment, and toward stabilization. We contribute to HRM/TM scholarship by showing that talent architectures in hype‐driven emerging industries are not best understood as fixed bundles of best practices or as universal organizational stages, but as contingent configurations that must be rebalanced as external expectations, legitimacy, regulation, and resource availability change. We further identify stage‐specific talent logics: rapid capability acquisition, accelerated scaling, defensive stabilization, capability consolidation, and strategic optimization. The findings advance research on contextualized TM, temporal dynamics, and organizational value by explaining when and why different forms of talent become strategically valuable in emerging industries.