Knowledge is Constraint

Right.. start with the philosophical thought for the day. I have been thinking about this thing for a while. A month ago one of my colleagues, Sandeep, came up with the idea of software development automation. His idea was to create agents which could organically learn and create software constructs. This spurred thoughts in my mind about how much constrained we are about what is possible. Say we are facing a problem, we typically tend to solve it using the knowledge that we already have. This in turn prevents us (or our minds) from having new ideas. As usual our mind keeps thinking of what is feasible, based on prior knowledge. This is more emphatic in information technology. The new techniques come up every other day and we have to some extent glorified the term "innovation". Essentially what we do is use old discoveries in new contexts.. some people even went ahead and termed it as "applied innovation", wow talk of play of words!
Human minds are tuned to reuse the knowledge, to an extent that majority of us could not trust any new notion. History is full stories of this kind. A scientist proposes a new idea and rest of the society turns its back on it, terming it is one of those "new ideas". Even Julius Caesar at one point of time wondered whether there was anything beyond "known universe". Fortunately in modern times (ok... these are modern times because I am in it; Time like everything else is relative!), we are less opposed to new ideas. However coming back to problem solving, our knowledge of existing techniques and tricks is always a constraint. If the problem could not be solved using existing tricks we think it is difficult to solve... Ok I am not advising the creative mind theory here, but I think if we remove the constraint we are probably half way there. It is important to remove this constrain, as a fellow blogger quotes, What ur mind doesn’t know, ur eyes wont see.
Removing constraints of knowledge would also mean freeing mind to solve problems as a child would. Theoretically a child has no knowledge so your mind free of knowledge and child's mind should be at equal advantage (or disadvantage depending on way you look at it). Thus a child can solve the problems much better than an adult. But this does not seem to be the case... so what is missing in this theory ? I do not know... I am still thinking...