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Giles comments on HELP! I want to do good - Less Wrong Discussion
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OK I'll answer your actual question this time.
It's difficult to know which idea is the correct one as I don't know what the limiting factor is; why more cell phone-level inventions aren't already occurring.
Hypotheses are: lack of motivation, lack of ideas, lack of engineering competence, too much risk/startup capital.
For "motivation" the obvious suggestion is some sort of X Prize.
For "ideas" my suggestion would be to develop a speculative fiction subculture, with a utopian/awesomeness/practicality focus. See what ideas pop out of the stories that might actually work.
For "engineering competence" we're back to education again.
For "business risk" all I could think of was a sort of simulated market ecosystem, where people are modeled as agents seeking health, status and other goals and where new products aren't introduced into the real marketplace until they show reasonable probability of success in the simulated one.
Another angle about getting in touch with your own inner selfishness.... I doubt that cell phones were invented by people who wanted to make the world a lot better. I suspect they felt personal irritation at being tethered to a location when they wanted to talk on a phone.
There was idealism attached to birth control earlier in the process, but there was still a common human desire to have sex without a high risk of producing children.
Tools for improving the world have to be attractive enough for people to want to use them. What's been getting on your nerves lately? Can you tell what you used to want, but you've gotten resigned to not having it?
The credential problem is one that I think could use some solving, and I have no idea where to start. People spend a tremendous amount on education-- and sometimes on "education", and a lot of it isn't spent on actually becoming more capable, it's spent on signalling that one is knowledgeable and conscientious enough (and possibly capable of learning quickly enough) to be worth hiring.
I'm not saying that everything spent on education is wasted, but a lot of it is, and capable people who can't afford education have their talents wasted.
It's possible that credentials are the wrong end of the problem to attack. People behave as though there's a capital shortage, which could also be expressed as a people surplus relative to capital. Maybe what we need is more capital.
Some of the Thiel fellows are working on combating the credential problem. Dale Stephens is the only one I know off the top of my head, but I think there might be others.