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Firms are increasingly engaging in crowdsourcing for innovation to access new knowledge beyond their boundaries; however, scholars are no closer to understanding what guides seeker firms in deciding the level at which to acquire rights from solvers and the effect that this decision has on the performance of crowdsourcing contests. Integrating property rights theory and the problem‐solving perspective while leveraging exploratory interviews and observations, we build a theoretical framework to examine how specific attributes of the technical problem broadcast by firms affect the seekers’ choice between alternative intellectual property rights (IPR) arrangements that call for acquiring or licensing‐in IPR from external solvers (i.e., with high and low degrees of ownership, respectively). Each technical problem differs in the knowledge required to be solved as well as in the stage of development of the innovation …