>In retrospective, I realize that I had to go through stupid ideas to develop a sense of what is viable and what isn't

Yep, as it turns out, when trying to create a new, valuable thing that people need, you actually need to make a bunch of attempts and try them out.

If you are ever in the position to have a team of people undertaking creating new things, the optimal path is to expose each person to a charter and scope of the area your team is trying to innovate in and then let them come up with their own ideas. Diversity of thought is the key to speeding up discovery of new, valuable embodiments of solutions that fulfill currently unfulfilled human needs.