[komlenic]

+1, Excellent post. You should have a blog or something...

I've noticed this too when examining what I view to be problem spaces. Often there is truly room for technical innovation alone - a better way to do something - but it is only when this technical innovation actually addresses a pain-point that you end up with something great.

For example I've been looking at some ideas in the personal debt-reduction space lately. It's easy to dream up technically better tools that could help people visualize and track how they can pay off their debts and build wealth, but that would require the assumption that the tools alone are people's only pain point. Paying down debt isn't fun. It takes a long commitment with no short term reward. It's not sexy. Work from these assumptions and somehow address them and you've helped solve a pain-point. Work from the assumption that we can build a better tool with feature x, and you ignore the real problem, and your real opportunity to address it.