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Societal challenges can be addressed not only by experts, but also by crowds. Crowdsourcing provides a way to engage the general crowd to contribute to the solutions of the biggest challenges of our times: how to cut our carbon footprint, how to address worldwide epidemic of chronic disease, and how to achieve sustainable development. Isolated crowd-based solutions in online communities are not always creative and innovative. Hence, remixing has been developed as a way to enable idea evolution and integration, and to harness reusable innovative solutions. Understanding the generativity of remixing is essential to leveraging the wisdom of the crowd to solve societal challenges. At its best, remixing can promote online community engagement, as well as support comprehensive and innovative solution generation. Organizers can maintain an active online community; community members can collectively innovate and learn; and as a result, society may find new ways to solve important problems. What affects the generativity of a remix? We address this by revisiting the knowledge reuse process for innovation model. We analyze the reuse of proposals in an online innovation community which aims to address global climate change issues, Climate CoLab. We apply several analytical methods to study factors that may contributemore »to the generativity of a remix and uncover that remixes that include prevalent topics and integration metaknowledge are more generative. Our findings suggest strategies and tools that can help online communities to better harness collective intelligence for addressing societal challenges.« less