Market research: don't just ask customers

In trying to provide appropriate solutions for customers, it is commonplace and expected-behavior to ask customers for feedback and suggestions for new products or new features. There is generally nothing wrong with doing this. Sometimes, customer do indeed give you some idea gems. The caveat is that if you only listen to customers, you would find that they typically provide you ideas of incremental value for what they already have. 

"If I had listed to customers, I would've given them a faster horse, and not a car." -- Henry Ford

What's the better thing to do? Naturally, the best thing is to walk a mile in your customer's shoes by doing what they do. As you struggle to do their work, you experience first-hand the problems they face. 

What if you can't actually do what they do? Perhaps what your customers do is highly specialized and you lack the qualifications (e.g. a surgeon) to actually do what they do. The next best thing is to observe your customer's needs. Once you observe what they do in order to accomplish their goals, you will witness and better understand their pain points and struggles, even unarticulated ones. Sometimes, customers are so used to doing things a certain clunky way, they don't even think to complain about it because they have resigned themselves to that process. When you observe your customer's needs, you might be able to think creatively and provide them with a better solution that they need.

While there are lots of problems to be solved, not all of them are worth solving...at least not from a venture standpoint. The problem has to be experienced by a large enough market that is willing and able to buy your solution at your proposed price for a venture fund to invest in bringing that solution to the market. As such, there are definitely solutions that can be created to solve meaningful problems that don't ever get venture-backed, yet are perfectly viable businesses or new products of a current business that can be added profitably. It doesn't mean that if it's a non-venture backable idea, that it's not a good or profitable one to pursue. It simply depends on where you need to obtain funding from. If you're able to self-fund or bootstrap, that's a perfectly respectable way to bring a solution to market successfully for the benefit of the customers you serve.