5 In the context of our illustrative example of a two dimensional space, one might think of the brainstorming process for a valuable new product as the search for a gold mine (Terwiesch and Ulrich 2009). The (x, y) coordinates capture the geographic mine location and the z-axis captures the density of gold in the ground. Note that local adjustments along a gradient of increasing gold density in the ground via local search might possibly increase the value of a mining location. Yet, in solution landscapes that are rugged, i.e., that have multiple local optima, such local search is unlikely to yield the optimal solution. Figure 1: Two dimensional idea space with idea value in the third dimension