Online innovation communities allow for a search for novel solutions within a design space bounded by constraints. Past research has focused on the effect of creative constraints on individual projects, but less is known about how constraints affect learning from repeated design submissions and...

Scholarly and practitioner literature have both described the potential benefits of using methods associated with a “design thinking” approach to develop new innovations. Most studies of the main design thinking methods -- need finding, brainstorming, and prototyping -- are based either on...