Clever entrepreneurs know there are always ways to be wrong for less money and fewer resources. You could ask for the money to address the big problem, or you could bring the problem down to a scale the available resources permit. Doing so lets you actually begin to work on solving your problem right away. You can start with parts lying around, and bring resources to the problem or bring your problem to the resources.
Create a tangible aversion of the problem that could be set up at table scale, and then begin by simulating what the solution would have to accomplish at that scale.
Workshop participants learned to acquire knowledge on-demand—when they needed it—rather than encyclopedically.
There certainly are ways to be wrong more quickly with less effort and less money—and to learn something along the way.
From the book, Innovating: A Doer’s Manifesto for Starting from a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively Wrong by Luis Perez-Breva