“Tech people tend to be interested in more early-stage start-ups,” said William Foster, head of consulting at the Bridgespan Group, which works with nonprofits and philanthropists on high-impact social change projects. These philanthropists typically support disruptive new ideas, get more directly involved in their giving and show a willingness to move quickly to another approach when one fails.

Take, for example, September’s announcement by the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, his wife who is a doctor, that they would spend $3 billion of their fortune over 10 years on seeking to end the ravages of disease within their infant daughter’s lifetime.

The couple, who made the pledge after years of conversations with scientists and other philanthropists, did not donate the money to a leading medical institution or university. Instead, they said they intended to invest the funds in efforts to build basic tools to help the whole scientific community make breakthroughs in research.

Initially, about $600 million will go to create a new nonprofit research institute in San Francisco, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, whose first projects include creating a map of all cells in the body and setting up a rapid strike force of researchers to tackle outbreaks of infectious diseases like those caused by the Ebola and Zika viruses.

Some of the $3 billion will be spent advocating for more public and private money to attack disease. As they have done with their education initiatives, the couple is also likely to take ownership stakes in for-profit companies that are doing promising work.

The multipronged approach taken by Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan — classic gifts to nonprofit organizations, venture capital-style investments in businesses with social missions, and policy advocacy — is deliberate, allowing the couple maximum flexibility as they carry out their plan to give away 99 percent of their Facebook fortune, currently worth about $54 billion.

An early pioneer of the concept was the Omidyar Network, created in 2004 by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of the eBay online auction and retail site, and his wife, Pam.