Creating solutions, finding problems

"Instead of looking at a solution first and trying to find a problem for it, look for
a problem first and try to find a solution for it."

These simple words of wisdom were imparted to me by my computer science professors back in college. At the time I was working on an independent study course with some CS friends that involved the iPaq PDA's. We had picked the iPaq for our independent study project, mostly because it meant we would be given the device to play around with for most of the quarter. When asked what we were going to do with the iPaq's, we didn't really have an answer. We knew we just wanted to play around with these cool toys. We had no real idea what we were going to do but we knew we could find a problem that could be solved by this new portable solution. (We ended up cobbling together some "PDA in the classroom environment" type project that was eventually picked up by other students and converted into Pocket Classmate.)

Sadly enough I still fall into this trap sometimes. For example, I really want to do something with crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. I have a 'solution' in mind, the power of the crowd, but I don't have a real problem to address. I also like the idea of tying virtual goods to real world goods, but I can't really figure where this 'solution' would fix a real problem. Oh, did I mention there's a $750 3D printer that I really want to buy, for no reason other than wanting to play around with a cool new toy? Luckily I know enough these days not to move forward with these random ideas, but instead I file them away in my head as options to consider when I find real problems to attack.