Distinguished by its clever facial hair funding gimmick, the Movember foundation raised $1.3 million for men's health in New Zealand last year, and $80 million globally.
But while far less publicised than The Mo itself, the strict method the foundation distributes those funds to research institutes may actually be the most original aspect of the charity.
The Movember foundation attempts to bypass what they see as wasteful competition between scientists, and the hoarding of knowledge and information which hampers progress and research breakthroughs.
If you want funds from the Movember foundation, you have to be prepared to share your knowledge with rival scientists in the same field, and according to Movember NZ country manager Robert Dunne, it's been a slightly slow learning curve for the industry.
"To put it bluntly, in the early years the medical community didn't necessarily buy into it and we were probably a smaller organisation, but now we're bigger and there is some funds there and if people want to access those funds... that's part of the arrangement," Mr Dunne says.
"Unfortunately within the medical community there's quite a lot of duplication going on, people work in silos a wee bit.
"So if you want to work with us and receive our funds you need to be willing to not only share the things that work, but the things that don't work, because they're just as important. So that's a bit of a mantra for us and we think it will accelerate outcomes.
Through a strict action plan called Knowledge Translation Framework, the Movember foundation attempts to share research findings, however small and incremental, between its research partners to avoid duplication.
Robert Dunne says Kiwi men's negligent attitude to their health needs to change.
A "landscape" report synthesising and analysing all of Movember's funded research is annually completed and disseminated to all the charity's research stakeholders, and regular forums are held to encourage information sharing.
The charity's concern over scientific duplication does have some support from within the research industry.
In a report organised by one of the world's oldest medical journals a number of years ago, The Lancet estimated a hugely disconcerting 85 per cent of all all the money invested in biomedical research is wasted.
That was estimated at $200 billion (USD) of the nearly $240 billion invested in biomedical research globally in 2010.
"A focus on publication of reports in journals with high impact factors and success in securing of funding leads scientists to seek short-term success instead of cautious, deliberative, robust research," the authors of the Lancet piece write.
The pre-eminent scientific research journal in the world, Nature, has also made a call to arms for "scientists and practitioners to work together to develop a commonly adopted blueprint for action" when it comes to environmental conservation across the globe.
Examples they give are structured debate to identify common goals, pooling data sets and collectively setting an agenda for prioritising what should be.
However, Vice Chancellor of AUT University Derek McCormack denies both that collaboration does not extensively happen between research groups across fields, and competition between research groups is counterproductive to progress.
"I think it's almost impossible to prove that this [Movember's] enforced collaboration produces better results than any other system," said Mr McCormack.
"One argument could be that competition actually hastens progress.
"If you look back through the history of science you get these intense moments of competition that mark big discoveries.
"Darwin was competing with Wallace as he released the theory of evolution, and natural selection. The structure of DNA and the Theory of Relativity - Einstein was the first to determine that but there were many other people working on that around the world.
Mr McCormack also argued that having different people work on a problem, not in direct collaboration, has its advantages.
"You have a diversity of approaches, the competition hastening outcomes, and also the need to produce work that can be tested, reproduced and verified," he said.
"I think it would be unfair to characterise the current scientific community as non-collaborative. Collaboration does happen a lot. Commercialism is actually the biggest slow-down to progress. If people have a billion dollar idea they want to hold onto that."
Mr McCormack also cited structures within New Zealand, such as the National Science Challenge and the Centre of Research Excellence, which encourage collaboration and the sharing of information between research groups.
But while debate may exist over Movember's conditions for distributing its funds, there's no question over the success of it's fundraising efforts.
With a just over a week left in their 2018 drive, Mr Dunne says they are set to eclipse last year's effort of $1.3 million by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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