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So one person could have such outsized effect on a community through the market forces he created.

What if this force could be used for good? Is there a way I could write my will to convince a large number of people to solve climate change, for example?

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The standard way of doing this is to make a prize given to the first research team to accomplish some breakthrough. See for example the DARPA Grand Challenge (self driving cars), the Brain Preservation Prize (preserving and scanning ever larger brains / brain samples at ever increasing resolution), or, most famously, the Nobel Prize (whatever the "best" research in the field as a whole is that year).

I am not sure that generates much real improvement in the world, surely funding research is more impactful that giving a prize for work that would have been done anyway?

My hunch would be that early on in the process of innovation, you're quite a distance from profiting from that research. Unless you have pockets deep enough to go all the way, there's potentially value in encouraging many people to try and get slightly further on solving challenging problems in the open, so that all can learn.

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