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It seems a bit forced to look hard for an idea, its usually a process, not something you just come up with overnight. Not to be a downer but it might be better to look for some work until you find something you truly care about.
Pick one and execute a MVP. You'll learn about your ability to make it happen as a team. Part way through, you'll probably come up with a better idea.
I find walking our dogs in the woods or driving leads to thinking, which usually leads to ideas. Feel free to shoot me an e-mail.
Good ideas are hard ... sometimes simple and overcrowded markets yield the best results. Facebook is basically usenet with a better UI/UX ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet ). Amazon was a book store. What you need is something where you provide a specific solution to a real problem, something people are really willing to pay for. Network, speak to people, ask them about their problems. What do they wish existed.…
The one thing I am never short of is ideas. I used to think they'd stop coming but always new ideas come and I write them down in a list now. Too many to execute. Some good, some probably not so great. The accepted wisdom is that ideas are worth nothing but I strongly disagree. I think most ideas are worth nothing, but some ideas are incredibly valuable so I don't give my ideas away in case I want to make use of them…
The few product ideas we came up with following the above process we dropped, often because we discovered that that space is ultra crowded or commooditized. GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons once said something like (paraphrased slightly) "never be scared to enter a crowded market. Just be better than everybody else". Something to think about. Beyond that, consider that your product is not the only dimension on which you c…
An open problem that's "sexy" but may be intractable is that of fact checking. Can you determine which articles in a corpus of news, or other documents, agree/disagree with one another? Can you cluster and sub-cluster along statements of fact being made? Can you then trace a statement of fact back to it's "original source" based on when that entry was acquired? There's a lot of opportunity in that space...
People care about facts that go their way and ignore the others.
But if you could interject at this moment of initial assimilation and provide some legitimacy or point out the lack thereof, you could provide a very useful service.
It would also help people change their minds, although as you mentioned, that is harder to do. But at least now you have better tools to do it.
Finally, not EVERYONE is completely disinterested in having their misconceptions corrected.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13576236
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139638
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007
Also, there was a Show HN nearly a year ago for http://patentsexpiringtoday.com/ which is a service for exploring ideas whose patent protection have expired.
One anecdote I have a friend (~30) who works in real estate appraisal. He says the industry is run on excel. While it might not make you a unicorn, you could definitely make money having a better solution.