Innovative system development is crucial to survive the global competition for many organizations. Engineers are turning their focus on the early phase of system development where the customers' needs and wants are defined and problems are defined. Combination of design thinking and systems thinking is considered as a beneficial prescription. And today, some kind of recipes are in great demand. This paper focuses on problem definition process in the early concept stage and introduces a framework for generating creative and innovative problem statements that would bring out more chances for innovative solutions. The framework had been developed for a project based learning program in Keio University. The framework consists of five approaches. Most of them require users to exert design thinking and systems thinking at the same time. The paper introduces step‐by‐step process for each approach and examples.