There are two kinds of people in the world – market makers and executionists. Market makers are great at spotting gaps in markets, and deriving business ideas out of them. They could also be great at finding and executing solutions, but their primary skill is in identifying the gaps in the market and framing the problem.
Executionists are great at execution and problem-solving. However, they need the problem to have been defined in the first place. Their ability to spot gaps in markets and thus lay out problem statements is questionable, though.
Executionists fall under different levels. It has to do with how much ambiguity they can handle. There are some for whom the problem must be defined as well as the method to solve the problem. “here is a problem. Do a logistic regression and solve it”, you need to tell them and they will use logistic regression (assuming they are trained in the subject) to solve the problem. At the next level you have people whom you can ask to find patterns in some data, but then they will figure out that the problem can be framed as a logistic regression problem and will then proceed to solve it. Further up, you just give them a business problem, and then they will figure out what data set can be used ot solve it, figure out that doing a logistic regression will solve the problem and then they will solve it. And so forth.
Then again, the first line of this blog post is wrong. There is no real barrier between market makers and executionists. There are people who are both (good for them) and those who are good at neither. However, you realize that if you are an executionist of level i, you will need the guidance of an executionist of level i+1 or above. And that if you are a highest level executionist you will need the guidance of a market maker.