Design thinking (DT) unfolds quickly as a method for managing innovation, beyond traditional decision-making and product development paradigm (Liedtka 2015). DT success appears as a symptom of the emergence of a design paradigm in innovation management (Boland and Collopy 2004; Le Masson, Weil, and Hatchuel 2010; Gruber et al. 2015; Seidel and Fixson 2013; Ben Mahmoud-Jouini, Midler, and Silberzahn 2016). Here lie the potential limits of DT because it is presented as method, inspired by a profession, and its theoretical foundations require further grounding (von Thienen et al. 2018). Consequently, casting DT into design theory will reveal some flaws as well as its potential because it will also reveal ways to expand DT into a new generation of techniques to support the metabolism (Hatchuel, Weil, and Le Masson 2006) of innovative firms and ecosystems. In this paper, we propose to use design theories frameworks to analyze cases of DT-in-use in a large firm to reveal its generativity and defixation capacity. We explicitly show the extent of learning metabolisms and potential user fixations encoded in the DT method. It encourages proposing ways of extending with other techniques to validate and support the potentials of DT as it has been developed through decades.