Why problems come before ideas

Most ideas that fail were never anchored to a problem anyone would pay to remove. Start with a problem statement that names the affected user, how often the problem occurs, what it costs them today and what they do about it now.

Exercise: pick one problem from the Problem Bank (or your own) and write it in this form: "_[User]_ needs a way to [outcome] because [evidence], and today they [workaround] which fails because [limitation]."

A good statement is specific enough that two engineers would build towards the same target, and honest about the evidence: an observation you made, a published statistic, or an interview. Mark anything you have not verified as an assumption.

Why this matters for IP: examiners, investors and licensees all ask the same first question — what does this solve? A clear problem also tells you which prior art to search.