I would argue that your innovation center should be staffed primarily focusing on productivity rather than scale. You can always add scale as needed but you can’t add productivity once you’re at scale
My team is the heart of my company's innovation center and we've very intentionally sacrificed a lot of productivity for alignment and it's been really good for the business. It's an internal platform with probably another ~20 eng years of work left, turns out the bits of work our team thought would be most impactful weren't. By focusing on alignment we've been able to sequence the work so that more of company gets onboard early and the company as a whole delivers more value, faster, with less long term debt.
Probably the most obvious one that HN readers will be familiar with is the 10x developer who trail blazes out amazing software but even if they do document it well, it generates an unsustainable technical foundation because it can't be supported after they move on (whether internally or externally). In a startup, this person is invaluable. In a large organisation you may even screen them out at interview stage in certain contexts.