| Summary: | Idea competitions can help organizations innovate and IT support can make it easier to enrol participants, facilitate collaboration and manage the process. Thus far, the literature on IT-enabled idea competitions has focused mainly on engaging external actors; consequently, we know less about the internal engagement of employees. Moreover, although the literature reveals several challenges in managing internal IT-enabled idea competitions, there are no comprehensive empirical accounts of how these challenges manifest in organizational contexts. Against this backdrop, we investigate how an engineering consultancy adapted an IT-enabled idea competition to support innovation, innovation awareness and knowledge sharing. This descriptive case study provides a detailed analysis of the breakdowns that manifested, what triggered the breakdowns, and how the organization responded. Our analysis reveals that the system required substantial adaptation, and, although it addressed well-known challenges in managing idea competitions, other challenges surfaced. We combine these empirical insights with extant literature to propose a model for understanding and explaining how our case organization handled the breakdowns that occurred while implementing the idea competition system. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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