Prior to incorporating OPUS NOVUM Foundation, over the last 7 years the founding members together with several professional colleagues, have been working in the area of space exploration.  Their work involved creating a highly successful collaborative environment between government, non-profit and for-profit entities by leveraging social norms vs. market norms, and resulted in exponentially growing research effort despite a recession economy. They successfully spun off technologies that came out of this unique collaboration into start-up companies which are cash-flow positive and growing. Analyzing the specific details and reasons for the success of this social norm based collaboration model, they decided to incorporate the essence of this success into a non-profit structure and make it available to others who will be addressing global challenges.