The way to cultivate it is letting people figure things out on their own and rewarding atypical solutions that arrive at the same conclusion.

A lot of education tries to deliver in a specific box and a specific way and any other method is punished. Society would likely get more value if education was more diverse in perspective and methods. It took me way too long to realize that I didn't care about anything but computers. I started doing better in my classes when I framed everything through my lens rather than viewing it through the instructor's lens.

I don't know the correlation but I think a lot of entrepreneurial families tend to have good problem-solving children or maybe it is a selection bias among friends. It could be genetic but I think these families tend to reward / not punish ingenuity. In addition, I believe part of the equation is leaving children alone to figure things on their own. It sucks but I think that letting your kids jump into the deep end of the proverbial pool makes them better for it even if they flail for a bit.

Give them boundaries but give them the space to figure it out and make mistakes. I know it drove my parents crazy that me and my siblings took everything apart and argued systematically but it paid off in our adulthood.

We do. It's called culture.

But culture doesn't optimize for something so narrow since it exists in a much wider context than just "what's good for knowledge workers in a capitalist system".