Paper to be presented at DRUID18 Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark June 11-13, 2018 Unleashing the Power of Internal Crowds Mette Praest Knudsen SDU Department of Marketing & Management mpk@sam.sdu.dk Mats Magnusson KTH, Royal Institute of Technology Department of Machine Design matsmag@kth.se Marianne Harbo Frederiksen SDU Dept. of Technology and Innovation mha@iti.sdu.dk Jennie Björk KTH, Royal Institute of Technology Department of Machine Design jenniebj@kth.se Abstract Much is already known about why and what firms can gain from external crowdsourcing of ideation activities, whereas internal crowdsourcing where firms seek ideas for innovation among its employees has so far received less attention. The rationale for using external and internal crowds has thus been assumed to be the same, to collect a diversity and large number of ideas. This article pinpoints that the design principles known from the external crowdsourcing literature cannot simply be used for internal crowds. In fact, an attempt to do so entails a need for considering several trade-offs. Drawing on the extant theory and the knowledge that we have accumulated over the years from researching large firm’s use of IT-based ideation systems, we identify these trade-offs, propose several design decisions to consider, which are linked to the innovation ambition of a firm, and develop a model of employee engagement in internal crowdsourcing.