[Lutger]

Exactly. This is the most important part people just don't get. Customers are really, really bad at solving their own problems. In my domain, they all come up with a crude and barely functioning variant of excel in a web browser.

Listening to a customer is not some manual variant of a mechanical A/B test. You really need to immerse yourself in their world and peel off all the things they say that gets in the way of the problem. Its a skill of empathy.

I think the real 10x leaps that 'create new markets' don't just conjure up problems out of thin air: they are novel ways of solving a familiar problem. At best, they solve problems for which people have come to accept the lack of a good solution and thus don't articulate as problems anymore.

In the most extreme case, an innovation creates a new problem in the sense that suddenly a desirable alternative for the status quo can be imagined where it couldn't before. To me, that still implies the innovator just deeply listened to the customer and discovered a potential problem others failed to recognize.