Alloy Partners CEO, Elliott Parker, recently presented at an Innov8rs webinar, challenging the conventional wisdom on corporate innovation. He argued that the purpose of an innovation team is not to chase near-term revenue, but to build long-term resilience by accumulating knowledge about the future. He describes it as ‘playing the infinite game.’

If you want to dive deeper into how your innovation team stacks up, you can take our Infinite Game Readiness Assessment yourself here or download our accompanying guide, Playing the Infinite Game here.

Drawing on his insights, here are six essential lessons for any corporate leader and innovation team looking to define their mission and drive material, long-term impact.

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1. Prioritize Knowledge Over Wealth

Innovation teams often feel the pressure to close short-term revenue gaps with targets so aggressive that even hyper-growth startups would struggle to hit them. Elliott asserts that this is a misuse of the innovation function.

The core business is designed to generate wealth and profits, creating the financial buffer needed for future shocks. By contrast, the innovation team's fundamental role is to generate knowledge. Their mission should be framed as helping the company "play the infinite game," ensuring survival and long-term vitality by building an inventory of actionable insights. When innovation is measured solely by financial metrics, it inevitably drifts into safe, incremental work that should belong to the core business, failing to build the transformational knowledge required for endurance.

2. Embrace Business as an "Infinite Game"

Drawing on the philosophy of James Carse, Elliott describes business as an "infinite game," where the primary goal is not to win, but to keep playing, sometimes for centuries. This mindset is critical because while corporations hold record levels of cash today, their average lifespans are shrinking.

Capital efficiency alone does not guarantee endurance. Survival ultimately comes down to an organization's capacity to respond to unpredictable, high-impact crises — problems that exceed its available knowledge and wealth. To ensure corporate survival, organizations must continuously accumulate both of these assets, making the innovation team’s knowledge-gathering role a non-negotiable component of the strategy.

3. Treat Experiments as "Data About the Future"

If innovation’s job is to discover new knowledge, how is that data generated? Elliott’s central claim is that there is no real data about the future. All market reports and trend analyses are simply records of the past.

As Elliott discusses in the Illusion of Innovation, the only way to generate true data about what might work tomorrow is to run experiments today. An experiment is a deliberate act of turning an assumption into validated (or invalidated) knowledge. Like evolution in an ecosystem, corporations must run countless small, cheap experiments at the edges of the system. This practice of contained, low-cost mutations builds resilience over time, allowing the business to contain failures while scaling successful "mutations" back into the core. Venture building external startups through a structure like a venture studio is the way we most often recommend corporations run these fast, cheap experiments.

4. Optimize for "Magnitude of Correctness"

A frequent conflict arises when innovation teams are forced to adopt the same metrics, processes, and risk tolerances as the scaled organization. The core business optimizes for "frequency of correctness," rewarding leaders who are right most of the time.

Innovation work, however, must optimize for "magnitude of correctness." This means being wrong often, but occasionally being very right in a way that materially changes the company’s trajectory. Forcing an innovation team to adhere to the core business’s safe, predictable governance structure prevents the high-risk, transformational bets necessary for long-term survival.

5. Align Metrics with Learning, Not Just Profit

The right metrics enable innovation; the wrong ones can kill it. Metrics fundamentally encode an executive team’s definition of success. Effective innovation metrics must focus on:

• The speed at which the team converts assumptions into knowledge.
• The number of strategic options this learning creates for the core business.
• The momentum and volume of experimentation over time.

One powerful, often-underused metric is the degree to which external investors or other corporations want to invest in the ventures the innovation team is building. Outside capital chasing these initiatives signals that the team has uncovered "secrets about the future" the broader market has not yet recognized, validating both the knowledge created and its potential economic value.

6. Start with Executive Alignment

For leaders building an innovation team from scratch, Elliott advises starting with a philosophical agreement at the top: the core business gathers wealth, and the innovation function gathers knowledge.

While many C-suites speak the language of money and efficiency, it is the innovation leader's job to translate "learning" back to concrete outcomes, such as cost savings, new market creation, or strategic options. However, if that team is judged solely by near-term financial metrics, the fundamental agreement is broken, and the innovation team will fail to deliver the transformational experimentation needed to help the company play the infinite game.

Want to dive deeper into how your innovation team stacks up? Take the Infinite Game Readiness Assessment yourself here or download our guide, Playing the Infinite Game.

You can also watch the full Innov8rs Webinar recording on playing the infinite game: