Sorting Scams: Understanding Patterned Wrongdoing in Grand Challenges

Organizational wrongdoing is foundational in Grand Challenges (GC), and a GC itself. Understanding patterns of wrongdoing, rather than idiosyncratic cases, would facilitate management of GCs. Fraud patterns – scams – show five aggrandizing mechanisms, the structured processes by which fraudsters make themselves better off: demanding, taking, diverting, steering, and assuring. Eight patterns of manipulation are generated: Demand manipulations (speculation events – manias, bubbles, panics; cons – Ponzi schemes); and supply manipulations (exploits – exploitation of the formal reward system; cost off-loading/risk-shifting; extraction/extortion/rent-seeking behavior; expropriation; enticement; and normative rents – e.g., abuses of trust). The approach makes possible analysis of the logics of corruption and its construction, and of its prevention and repair via “braking and breaking the scam.” Finally, the article discusses some GCs that feature wrongdoing, identifies their aggrandizing mechanisms, offers sample strategies to brake or break the potential for wrongdoing, and discusses why organizational wrongdoing is indeed foundational in GCs.