I would try not to focus on ‘discovering problems’ when ‘going into the field’. Consider what you will get if you ask directly what someone's problems are: only

I would try not to focus on ‘discovering problems’ when ‘going into the field’. Consider what you will get if you ask directly what someone's problems are: only the stuff everyone knows about and no one has solved in 200 years since the industrial revolution, ± 60 years since the first computers and ± 30 years since the commercialisation of the internet. They probably haven't been solved because there's some horrifying ROI maximalisation scheme behind it that you cannot beat, or solving the problem is terrible ROI for yourself. Going into the field anthropology-style means participatory observation; you join those that you are researching in whatever they are doing. You try to experience their world and uncover their interpretation of it. You make an honest attempt to blend in and almost become of them. And then you don't become one of them, because your being-different enables you to identify opportunities that others in that field cannot. And that is the stuff great ideas are made of.