In response to this post on execution and strategy, Andy VanGundy writes:

For me, ideation and execution need to be driven by strategy which stems from visions with buy-in. A colleague and I have been preparing for an ideation session with a large financial services firm on the East Coast. We start out with a list of questions we have key managers respond to. I then synthesize all of those and distill them into a short list of potential challenge statements for the client to choose from. (In this case I started with 65 statements and am now creating affinity groups.) We call this a Q-Bank. After all of these, a decision is made on what challenges to use for ideation.

My point is saying all of this is that if the front-end is attended to, then the back-end (implementation) is likely to be more successful since you increase the odds of solving the "right" problem correctly. (Ian Mitroff wrote that it is better to solve the "right" problem incorrectly than the wrong problem correctly.) In my experience, if this front end immersion is not done, then ideation and implementation suffer and the ideation session can turn into a major discussion on what the "real" problem is--something that should have been done before.

The thorniest problem in all of innovation seems to be determining customer's unmet needs. Essentially, that is a process of trying to first find out what you don't know you don't know, then find a solution for that.