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I agree that incentivizing innovation is a good thing, but when it becomes a pressure, we tend to get less innovative ideas, and more wasteful stuff, planned obsolescence, and even loss of functionality. It's like a system going overshoot and distorting itself in a destructive manner, instead of building more over it. Some examples come to mind, like manufacturers adding iot to appliances that don't need it, sites redesigning their layout every couple years to add nothing new at all, confuse the user base and become more resource intensive, new windows versions bringing heavy incompatibilities, but barely any new features, google worsening the results of their perfectly functional search engine that billions of people use daily, just to add some mandatory ai stuff that could have been optional, etc.

MAXIMUM REFRIGERATE!!!

Notification: "help, I have gone through an iceberg!"

Grassroot efforts at building things for improving the lives of the disabled has been done, although there are reasons for why they don't get as much exposure. Reading about your Lego Mindstorms project made me think of what people were doing in early 90s Cuba.
When the Soviets left, Cubans relied on things like Olivo Verde (I think it was called, translated to Green Olive), a couple of books encouraged by Che Guevara to reuse items for all sorts of things. Some of those things included motorised wheelchairs for some folks to get around.

There is a website I believe named after one of those Cuban projects, the Rikimbili, which outlines a lot of the stuff.
Link: https://www.ernestooroza.com/rikimbili/ (there is more on that site).