Before you can make something meaningful, you must immerse yourself in problems, either yours or someone else's. You need to learn what the ailments are, then find a cure. It's easy to see when someone is simply targeting a market they think is ripe for exploiting, and are not really immersed in solving problems.
Reminds me of a ME310 project we did at Stanford. Problem statement was so vague but it was around disabilities and keeping people active in the winter. What was my first reaction? Step into a wheelchair and spend the next 4 days in it completely playing the role. 100% immersion! Then made a list of every possible experience i could go through in this situation and did as many as i possibly could. Now that is immersion my friends and it was key to our team really understanding the problems and building rapport with some of our users. I have to say it was also a magical, eye opening experience.
Totally agree, immersion (plus interviews & observation) is often essential to discovering insights, especially for changing behaviors and solving latent needs.
I've learned first hand immersing myself in communities like East Palo Alto with http://muralmusicarts.org and in nations like Myanmar, South Africa & the White Mountain Apache tribe with http://extreme.stanford.edu.
