Startup Professionals Musings: Startups: Start with a Problem, Not an Idea
http://blog.startupprofessionals.com/2009/03/startups-start-with-problem-not-idea.html

Potential startup founders are always looking for ideas to implement, when they should be looking for problems to solve. I see startups who are on the road to implementing an idea, but haven’t figured out what problem it solves – the business plan waxes on about how great the product/tech is, but never gets around to defining the problem (investors call it the “solution looking for a problem” syndrome). A related red flag in a business plan is a missing competitive analysis section or “this product has no competition.” My reaction is, if there is no competition, then there is no market demand for your product, so why are you building it? Luckily, many startups are smart enough to keep morphing their idea until it finally fits a real-world problem, and they can move forward in the marketplace. Unfortunately they could have saved themselves much lost time, money, and heartache if they had just focused on identifying the problem before they built a solution.

How to Define a Problem http://www.wikihow.com/Define-a-Problem – proyectoweb (proyectoweb) http://twitter.com/proyectoweb/statuses/7716955899

brief guide to problem solving (Polya based)

Good for planning (and general common sense)