If there is a gap, something will fill it. Therefore, any growing startup already has or will soon have competitors. And the winner in this race is not the one who has the best idea (after all, they will be more or less similar), but the one who knows how to deal with competitors better than others.
That way, the best startup incubators, and acceleration programs are not the places where you get to study how to come up with ideas. And those where you get to study how to deal with competitors. So if we take an existing product on the market and then create an offer better (“better” is a quite relative thing actually since depends on human opinion which is not a fixed list of countable parameters) than the existing one that way it will be the best way to conquer.
In this plan, startups who come up with a way to improve the product will get a grade of D. C grade goes for those who came up with a way to improve marketing and sales.
You get a B grade if you do not invent something, but find some idea from another country and just copy it in your local market. Perhaps you will need to adapt it to your local market.
Want an A? Then you have to get your butt up and do it!
Everybody knows the law of physics: quantity is transformed into quality.
Like, you have to come up with 100 new ideas for that one of them to be promising.
But maybe it would be better to research some interesting markets and choose an interesting product for your startup idea. And then do the same thing and verify 100 ways to conquer it.
One of these ways will definitely work.