CASE STUDY 10D Crowdsourcing Pays Off talent pool and a higher return on investment (ROI). Ulti- mately, the company received more than 300 ideas from global experts for solving its problem. It narrowed the pool down to three finalists, from which a winner was cho- sen. The whole process took approximately four months, and Precyse estimated that it saved the company $250,000.20 Crowdsourcing is not only used for relatively simple tasks such as designing a Web site or designing a case for a smartphone. Today, it is increasingly being used in more complex designs as well. Precyse Technologies provides supply-chain products and solutions that assist organizations in track- ing their inventories using RFID technol- ogy. It was having dif- ficulty improving the performance and bat- tery life of a particular RFID device; there were not adequate internal resources to tackle the problem. So, Precyse asked Innocentive, crowdsourcing provider, for assistance, believ- ing that crowdsourcing would provide quick access to a worldwide --Crowdsourcing Answer the following questions: 1. What are some typi- cal applications of crowdsourcing? 2. What are some ad- vantages of crowd- sourcing? 3. How could crowd- sourcing reduce the systems design cost? a Ruwprl.com/Shutterstock.com