I only partially agree with this. Having spent a lot of time in the “find a problem then the solution” way of working, I’ve found the solutions are often too tame and lack innovation.
When you’re truly bring novel new value to things, sometime you need to say “we can do this cool thing, but don’t know what that means”. Simply knowing that capability opens you up to better sets of solutions.
What's wrong with tame and lack of innovation? Sometimes people just need to get things done. There are lots of businesses with basic needs that aren't being met.
Especially amongst programmers the feeling of constantly pushing boundaries and grinding to a new unexplored territory is far more interesting than working on practical “tame” solutions. See for instance the amount of people who spend tons of time hacking at and opening up platforms for GNU/Linux that are poor fits for the OS. It would make far more practical sense for say Marcan to spend his time working on the Linux kernel more directly than playing around with Apple devices that are made to burn out in a year and become ewaste. However, he feels more satisfaction working on that “new frontier”, regardless of its practicality.
When you’re truly bring novel new value to things, sometime you need to say “we can do this cool thing, but don’t know what that means”. Simply knowing that capability opens you up to better sets of solutions.