🟢 Leveraging the Problem Mindset

Innovation starts with pain, not ideas

I'm often asked what if there is a master switch that, once flipped, will give you a better innovation mindset. Yes, there's one, and it's not even hidden; it's something that we always start with: innovators don't need "ideas", they need to find a problem to solve.

Most people can recite the mantra easily enough—solve a problem, start from the problem, what is the problem you want to solve?—but the mindset behind this seemingly simple starting point is rather hardcore, or at least quite counter-intuitive. Once you get it, though, you're forever out of the "innovation theater" zone.

Let’s unbundle why it is so critical to think in terms of 'problem.'

1. Problems are not wishful

The first thing you probably need to understand is that, in any innovation field, what customers want, desire, or aspire to is, at best, unreliable and, most likely, completely wrong.